This is the website of a research project led by Benjamin Fagard (a researcher in Linguistics at the French CNRS, in Paris) and Jordan Zlatev (a Professor in Linguistics at the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University, Sweden).
The goal of our project is to try to disentangle the arbitrary from the universal or predetermined in language evolution, by analyzing the way different speakers of different languages describe a similar set of situations. We do this through elicitation: we show participants a series of images or video clips and ask them to describe what they saw, as naturally as possible. A (slightly more detailed) description of the project can be found on my lab’s website (http://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/Labex-TransferS-De-l-espace-au?lang=en).
The ET project 