The cognitive functions of linguistic categories in describing persons: Social cognition and language.

Abstract

Three studies examined the cognitive implications of linguistic categories in the interpersonal domain. On the basis of conceptual and linguistic criteria, we advance a four-level classification that distinguishes between verbs and adjectives in the interpersonal domain. These four levels (in terms of increasing abstractness) are descriptive action verbs, interpretive action verbs, state verbs, and adjectives. Results from the first two studies reveal a systematic relation between the respective linguistic category and the temporal stability of the quality expressed in the sentence, the sentence's infonnativeness about the subject, the sentence's verinability and disputability, and the sentence's informativeness about a specific situation. Results from the last study support the four-level linguistic classification and its differential cognitive functions. Implications for social cognition and personality research are discussed. In the three studies reported in this article, we examine the cognitive functions of different linguistic categories used to describe persons and their behaviors. The aim is to elucidate how language mediates between social cognition and social reality. The interface between language and social cognition remains a relatively neglected issue in the burgeoning field of social cogni