{"pk":24620,"title":"Goal bias in using spatial language to describe changing quantities","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Numbers and space are associated in the mind, and in language. We investigate 6,400 instances of verbs indicating vertical movement (e.g., rise, fall, decline) or size-based changes (e.g., contract, grow, extend) in four corpora, showing that 60% of all uses occur in quantitative contexts (e.g., ‘prices rose'). For concrete spatial language, it has been found that movement goals are more likely encoded than sources (e.g., Lakusta & Landau 2005, Stefanowitsch, 2018). We demonstrate that this asymmetry carries over to spatial-numerical language, which more often encodes goals (e.g., ‘revenue went up to 48 million') than sources (e.g., ‘share prices rose from $7.13'). In line with their path-related meaning, vertical verbs showed a much higher propensity to encode endpoints (20%) than size-based verbs (10%), a large effect (Cohen's d = 2.0). These results show that the goal bias attested for spatial language carries over to abstract conceptual domains.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Event cognition; Language and thought; Semantics; Spatial cognition; Corpus studies"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01z48019","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Vinicius","middle_name":"","last_name":"Macuch Silva","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Birmingham","department":""},{"first_name":"Alexandra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lorson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Groningen","department":""},{"first_name":"Greg","middle_name":"","last_name":"Woodin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Birmingham","department":""},{"first_name":"Bodo","middle_name":"","last_name":"Winter","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Birmingham","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24620/galley/21210/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24620/galley/14217/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24620/galley/17984/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24620/galley/21210/download/"}]}