Giving is a unique attribute of human sharing. In this review, we discuss evidence attesting to our species’ preparedness to recognize interactions based on this behavior. We show that infants and adults require minimal cues of resource transfer to relate the participants of a giving event in an interactive unit (A gives X to B) and that such an interpretation does not systematically generalize to superficially similar taking events, which may be interpreted in nonsocial terms (A takes X). We argue that this asymmetry, echoed in language, reveals the operations of a mechanism of event construction where participant roles are encoded only when they are crucial to rendering an action teleologically well-formed. We show that such a representation of giving allows people to monitor the direction (who gave to whom) and kind (what was given) of resource transfer within a dyad, suggesting that giving may be interpreted as indicative of a relationship based on long-term balance. As this research suggests, advancing the study of the prelinguistic representation of giving has implications for cognitive linguistics, by clarifying the relation between event participants and syntactic arguments, as well as social cognition, by identifying which kinds of relational inferences people draw from attending to acts of sharing.

中文翻译：

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给予行动的表征：为社会关系监控服务的事件建构

给予是人类分享的独特属性。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了证明我们的物种已准备好识别基于这种行为的相互作用的证据。我们表明，婴儿和成人需要最少的资源转移线索来将交互单元中给予事件的参与者联系起来（A 将 X 给予 B），并且这种解释不能系统地推广到表面上相似的获取事件，这可以解释为在非社会术语中（A 取 X）。我们认为，这种不对称性在语言中得到体现，揭示了事件构建机制的运作，其中参与者角色仅当它们对于呈现目的论良好形式的行动至关重要时才被编码。我们表明，这种给予的表示允许人们监控二人组内资源转移的方向（谁给了谁）和种类（给予了什么），这表明给予可以被解释为表明基于长期的关系平衡。正如这项研究表明的那样，推进对给予的前语言表征的研究对认知语言学具有重要意义，通过澄清事件参与者和句法论证之间的关系，以及社会认知，通过确定人们从关注行为中得出哪些类型的关系推论分享。