LISA OBJECTIVE 1: How are social event descriptions understood?
In this part of the project, we created a database on how people interpret verbs on the dimensions of socialness (doing things together) and mutuality (doing something to each other). Those two concepts are of course closely related, but not the same!
The database is multilingual and contains data from English, German, and Hungarian. We are also continuously working on incorporating other freely available information, such as frequency statistics or imageability scores, to make this as useful as possible to the research community.
If you are interested in using the Linguistic Impact on Social Action Construal Database (LISADA), you can:
- read our paper for the CogSci 2025 conference here:
Srdoc, T., Marx, E., & Wittenberg, E. (2025). Event construal through social verbs in English and German: The LISADA corpus. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society.
Abstract: How do people understand linguistic descriptions of inherently and potentially social events, such as to meet and to dance, and how do these interpretations align or differ across languages? To explore these questions, we developed an empirical database (LISADA), containing ratings for 240 verbs in English and German along two social dimensions: mutuality and jointness. While both languages show an overall positive correlation between these dimensions, hierarchical cluster analyses reveal meaningful within- and cross-linguistic differences. Through an exemplary test case, we demonstrate how these differences can provide insights into the linguistic and conceptual representations of social events, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic marking in event construal. Finally, the LISADA corpus can serve as a basis for future research at the interface of language and social event cognition. - see and use the complete database at OSF: https://osf.io/xzdqc/
If you would like to use the LISADA database in your work, please cite it as follows:
Srdoc, T., Marx, E., Safrany, A. V., Balla, A., & Wittenberg, E. (2025). Linguistic Impact on Social Action Construal Database (LISADA). https://osf.io/xzdqc/