A twelve-language dataset for the study of event descriptions in expository and narrative texts

The same event, however, can be described in a virtually infinite number of ways. At present, we do not fully understand the extent to which event descriptions differ across individual writers, discourse genres, and languages.

Here, we introduce a twelve-language dataset in which 100 participants per language (Dutch, English, German, Hindi, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mandarin, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish) each described two events across two discourse genres (expository vs narrative) in a standardized online text elicitation study. The resulting dataset, comprising of 2,400 short texts written by 1,200 different participants, will allow for studying a wide variety of potential similarities and differences in how the same events and referents are described across individual writers, languages, and discourse genres.