Linguistic Category Model (LCM)

Using Language to Describe People

What types of words are available to describe others, their interactions, and their makeup? What types of words do people use when they are describing something that happens to a member of their ingroup or of an outgroup? Is there a systematic difference in how people communicate an event that happens to their ingroups or outgroups? Do such differences in the language they use provide any insights into their motives and their thought processes?

To answer such questions, we have to know something about the general properties of the language we use to describe ourselves, others, interactions between people, and people's makeup and to use this knowledge to examine how people represent social events when they communicate about them.

There are three different types of words or lexical categories that serve these purposes, namely, verbs, adjectives, and nouns. With verbs, we can describe not only the interactions between two or more people but also the types of feelings or states people have regarding others. Thus, we can describe an event, such as somebody's fist traveling rapidly in space only to connect hard with another person's chin, with “Jack punched Homer,” or “Jack hurt Homer” describing the action. It is also possible to describe the very same event with the feelings or emotions that drove the action, as in “Jack hates Homer.” Alternatively, we can represent the same event with “Jack is aggressive” or “Jack is a bully,” respectively with an adjective or a noun. These lexical categories exhaust the possible range of word options that we have to represent interpersonal events, that is, terms by which we can capture what happened, what the psychological states were in such events, and the features of those involved in a social event.

While we have only three groups of lexical possibilities (verbs, adjectives, and nouns), the range of events that we can cover with the multitude of distinct words that we can find in each category is virtually limitless. When we are talking about social events, we can access a lexicon, which contains virtually thousands of verbs, adjectives, and nouns. This vast range permits us to capture the nuances of each event with considerable flexibility. Are there some general features of this linguistic domain that allow us to systematically examine such language use? The linguistic category model provides such a handle.

How the Model Works

In the LCM, verbs are classified into two broad groups, namely, verbs of state and verbs of action. State verbs (SV) are verbs that refer to invisible states, such as respect, hate, dislike, and love, identifying specific affective or mental states that a person feels or experiences toward another (e.g., “Jack hates Homer”). Action verbs (AV) are verbs describing activities with a clear beginning and end.

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