Body ownership and beyond: connections between cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology.
During the past few decades, two disciplines that rarely come together-namely, cognitive neuroscience and linguistic typology-have been generating remarkably similar results regarding the representational domain of personal possessions. Research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that although the core self is grounded in body ownership, the extended self encompasses a variety of noncorporeal possessions, especially those that play a key role in defining one's identity. And research in linguistic typology indicates that many languages around the world contain a distinct grammatical construction for encoding what is commonly called "inalienable" possession-a category of owned objects that almost always includes body parts, but that also tends to include several other kinds of personally relevant entities. Both of these independent lines of investigation are summarized, and a number of interdisciplinary connections between them are discussed.
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, United States; Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, United States. Electronic address: kemmerer@purdue.edu.
David
D
Kemmerer
D001828:Body Image; D004532:Ego; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D009488:Neurosciences; D010067:Ownership
Body ownership; Full body illusion; Grammar; Inalienability; Linguistic typology; Possession; Rubber hand illusion; Self; Semantics; Somatoparaphrenia