Hot spots and emerging trends in ‘event’ research in linguistics (2001–2023): a bibliometric analysis

In linguistic studies, an event is defined as a particular occurrence or action conveyed through a sentence, generally encompassing participants and processes. This study conducts a visual analysis of 424 research articles on ‘event’ studies in linguistics, sourced from SSCI-indexed journals in the Web of Science Core Collection, to examine the evolution of linguistic research on ‘events’ since the beginning of the 21st century. The findings indicate that: 1) an increasing number of studies integrate linguistics with cognitive and neural sciences to explore how the brain processes event structures in language; 2) frequent interactions among different cultures have heightened attention to event expressions across linguistic and cultural contexts, particularly regarding temporal metaphors, and power dynamics in social interactions, and the expression of causality; 3) the importance of corpus data analysis in ‘event’ research has become more pronounced, along with a rise in the use of cognitive experimental techniques (such as ERP and fMRI), making interdisciplinary experimental designs more common. The study concludes by forecasting future trends in the research on ‘events’ within linguistics.