Tuesday, September 18, 2007

News at Eleven (Back Page): We can say "I poured water

into the glass" but not "I poured the glass with water." What accounts for this curious difference between "load" and "pour"? Pinker claims that pouring merely lets a liquid move under gravity's influence, whereas loading is motion determined by the human agent. "Pour" and "load" thus belong to different microclasses, and these microclasses reveal how we construe events.

from The Los Angeles Times: 'The Stuff of Thought' by Steven Pinker

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