Frequency, ordinal position and semantic distance as measures of cross-cultural stability and hierarchies for action verbs

Swedish and English (American) speaking subjects were given a superordinate description for a general class of actions that depict bodily movement. Based on a listing task similar to the one used in Battig and Montague (1969), the subjects were instructed to list all the actions that conformed to the superordinate. The results of the task indicate graded structure for the superordinate category as well as hierarchical relations between a basic and subordinate level as shown by measures of response frequencies and mean ordinal positions. These measures also correlated highly between the Swedish and American samples for the most frequently listed verbs, indicating a strong degree of cross-cultural stability. In an additional test of this stability, the ordinal positions of the verbs were used as proximity data in multidimensional scaling analyses in order to obtain a measure of the semantic distance between the different verbs. A correlation between the Swedish and American samples, using the derived distances for all possible pairs of the verbs, revealed a significant degree of stability. Furthermore, groupings of locomotory and vocal actions in the 3-dimensional multidimensional scaling solutions showed a tendency towards a much stronger stability. A speculative account of these results is proposed in terms of the physical constraints in human motion and the frequency of performing or seeing others perform actions around us.