Högskolan i Skövde

To what extent do Modern Greek, Polish, Swedish and American English similarly lexicalize action concepts, and how similar are the semantic associations between verbs denoting natural actions? Previous results indicate cross-linguistic stability between American English, Swedish, and Polish in verbs denoting basic human body movement, mouth movements, and sound production. The research reported here extends the cross-linguistic comparison to include Greek, which, unlike Polish, American English and Swedish, is a path-language. We used action imagery criteria to obtain lists of verbs from native Greek speakers. The data were analyzed by using multidimensional scaling, and the results were compared to those previously obtained.