The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select a set of variables (part of speech, morphological structure, countability, etymology) and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences.

中文翻译：

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具体和抽象概念的语言维度：词汇范畴、形态结构、可数性和词源

抽象概念和具体概念之间的区别是认知语言学和认知科学的基础。这种区别通常通过基于许多人的综合判断的具体性评级来操作。在使用这种操作化的实验研究中经常被忽视的是，评级归因于字，而不是直接的概念。在本文中，我们探讨了英语单词的语言特性与概念抽象性/具体性之间的关系。基于现有语言学文献中陈述的假设，我们选择一组变量（词性、形态结构、可数性、词源）并验证它们是否与具体性评级在统计上相关。我们表明，与其他词性相比，英语名词被评为更具体，但大众名词被评为不如可数名词具体。此外，更复杂的形态结构与抽象性有关，就词源而言，源自法语和拉丁语的词比其他来源的词更抽象。