The linguistic dimensions of concrete and abstract concepts: lexical category, morphological structure, countability, and etymology

Abstract

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select a set of variables (part of speech, morphological structure, countability, etymology) and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences.

Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment

“…for some concepts, participants disagree more in their ratings, as reflected in the corresponding standard deviations [65]. This was dealt with by adding standard deviations as regression weights to the linear mixed effects model, a method that has been shown to improve model fits for studies analysing concreteness ratings [63]. These regression weights penalize high-standard-deviation words.…”

“…Quadratic coefficients and standard errors extracted from the corresponding polynomial regressions; these models include regression weights penalizing high-standard-deviation words (cf [63]…”

The Interaction of Variables Affecting Definitional Skills: Extending Previous Research on Word Definitions

“…Τo our knowledge, no previous study has investigated the effect of semantic characteristics on both content and form of definitions from preschool age to adulthood nor the possible interaction with the grammatical category that a word belongs to. Considering the privileged association of nouns with punctual concepts and that of adjectives and verbs with relational concepts and also that relational concepts are closely related to abstractness (Strik Lievers, Bolognesi & Winter, 2021), in this study, we opted to investigate the effect of concreteness / abstractness only on definitions of nouns.…”

Abstract concepts: external influences, internal constraints, and methodological issues

“…Therefore, mental representations of abstract concepts can also be quite different between individuals and cultures (Borghi & Binkofski, 2014 ; Wang & Bi, 2021 ), subject to specific ways of acquisition, and context-dependent in their use (Falandays & Spivey, 2019 ). Finally, they also have some morphological specificities: for example, English mass nouns are considered more abstract than count nouns (Lievers et al, 2021 ).…”