Vol. 50 No. 1 (2012)
Articles

Grammatical categories and semantic distinctions: from linguistics to neuroscience

Domenica Romagno
Dipartimento di Linguistica - Università di Pisa - Via Santa Maria 36 - 56126 Pisa (Italy)

Published 2012-01-16

Keywords

  • grammatical categories,
  • neuroimaging,
  • semantics,
  • telicity

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.