Grammatical categories and semantic distinctions: from linguistics to neuroscience

Abstract

In the present paper, the results of two functional resonance imaging studies on the noun/verb distinction and the telic/atelic distinction are reported and discussed in or- der to provide an updated evaluation of the way linguistics and neuroscience can feed each other. These results show that brain processing of the noun/verb distinction is re- lated to the representation of verb and noun as graded multifactorial categories, and that verb processing and event knowledge in a verb-selective brain region are specifically related to the representation of telicity.