The volume contributes to “bridging the gap between linguistic and psychological research” (1) on event representation in language and cognition, After a concise review of previous work in the introduction (Pederson & Bohnmeyer), Andrew Pawley (Ch. 2) compares Kalam and English, addressing the question of the relationship between language and event conceptualization, as well as the more specific question of whether series of verb constructions in Kalam should be classified as a series of clauses/event representations, or as a construction in its own right (representing a single event). Bohnmeyer, N. J. Enfield, James Essegbey & Sotaro Kita (Ch. 3) are concerned with a typology of the segmentation of what they call “macro-events” into “events”—representations of dynamic stimuli (macro-event segments) influenced by lexical and syntactic constraints—focussing in particular on the segmentation of causal chains. Ch. 4 (Mary Carroll & Christiane von Stutterheim) presents findings from a study of English and German on the anchoring of the representation of events in context (specifically temporal context in this case), concluding that grammatical, semantic, and conceptual knowledge all come into play in determining the on-line linguistic representation of events. Asli Özyürek & Pamela Perniss (Ch. 5) discuss event representations in the Turkish and German Sign Languages. They indicate that choice of perspective and the semantics of the represented event influence event representation in both languages, but that there are also language-specific constraints.

In Ch. 6, Jeff Loucks & Eric Pederson summarize research on linguistic relativity in event representation, including two experiments of their own, and suggest that it might be more appropriate to examine event components other than figure, manner, and path, which are likely to constitute a single perceptual package. Ch. 7 (Dan I. Slobin, Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown, Sonja Eisenbeiß, & Bhuvana Narasimhan) explores children's early representations of placement events, looking at a range of factors, such as the distinction between “satellite-framed” and “verb-framed” languages and morphological and semantic characteristics of each language. In Ch. 8, Marianne Gullberg also explores placement events, this time comparing gestures of adult speakers of French and Dutch, discussing the differences and similarities in choices of spatial information encoded in gestural patterns. Christian Dobel, Reinhild Glanemann, Helene Kreysa, Pienie Zwitserlood, & Eisenbeiß (Ch. 9) discuss how visual and linguistic encoding interact when speakers describe events, using experimental data where participants were presented with coherent visual stimuli (readily interpretable as meaningful events), as well as incoherent ones (random arrangements of entities). Ch. 10 (Barbara Tversky, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Julie Bauer Morrison, & Bridgette Martin Hard) demonstrates effects of language on perception, and vice versa, through experiments involving named body parts vs. unnamed pictures of body parts, as well as participants thinking aloud vs. being silent while performing event segmentation tasks. Phillip Wolff, Matthew Hausknecht, & Kevin Holmes (Ch. 11) examine the representation of events caused “by omission,” proposing a definition of causation as brought about not only by a transmission of force, but also by the removal or absence of force.