[PDF] MOTION IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH: A PERSPECTIVE

noted: (a) English manner-of-motion verbs outnumber those of Spanish and tend to exploit some naïve a light A lot more understanding is yet to be acquired'

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[PDF] MOTION IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH: A PERSPECTIVE - TDXcat

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MOTION IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH:

PERSPECTIVE FROM COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS,

YPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Paula Cifuentes Férez

Ph. D. Thesis

Supervisor: Dr. Javier

Valenzuela Manzanares

Departamento de Filología Inglesa

Facultad de Letras

Universidad de Murcia

2008

To my family

Abstract

Motion is central to human experience; it is pervasive in our daily lives and also in our communicative needs. However, it is a well established fact that languages differ in their linguistic expression of motion. Talmy's (1985, 2000) work distinguishes two different types of languages according to the way the different elements of a motion event are mapped onto linguistic elements: satellite-framed and verb-framed languages. English and Spanish are often taken as examples of this typological difference. English, as a satellite-framed language, expresses the core component of motion, i.e., the Path or trajectory of motion, in satellites (e.g., up, down) or in prepositional phrases (e.g., into/out of the house), leaving the verb slot free to encode

Manner-of-motion. Spanish, as a verb-framed

language, typically expresses Path in the main verb while relegating the expression of Manner to adjuncts (e.g., entrar/salir corriendo lit. 'enter/exit running'). Talmy's seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last two decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner is often overlooked, as are minor lexicalisation patterns that might occur. Furthermore, scholars, more often than not, have neglecte d the study of path verbs in favour of the study of manner verbs, as the differing expression of Manner has so far been the most interesting diverging point between satellite- and verb-framed languages. Finally, hardly any work has been devoted to an in-depth analysis of the semantics of motion verb lexicons in both verb- and satellite-framed languages beyond the comparison of the motion verbs found in novels or elicited orally in the two types of language. The present thesis aims at bridging the gap in the existing literature by addressing the semantics of English and Spanish motion verbs. In the first part of this dissertation, a systematic and detailed account of the semantics of English and Spanish motion verb lexicons from a contrastive point of view is provided. The patterns of general conflations are explored, as well as more subtle path notions and fine-grained manner information which can be conveyed by motion verbs in these i iitwo languages. Comparison between English and Spanish leads to the identification of some similarities: (a) conflation of Motion plus one additional semantic component, either Manner or Path, is the most characteristic lexicalisation pattern of both motion verb lexicons; (b) both languages have path verbs which express, at minimum, 13 different types of Path; among these, the most frequently lexicalised types of Path are 'Away from G', 'Up/Onto G - Upwards', 'To/towards G' and 'Down from/to G - Downwards', whereas the least frequent is 'Out of G'; and (c) both languages possess many more walking verbs than running and jumping verbs. These tendencies suggest that there are important similarities in how English and Spanish, and possibly other verb- and satellite-framed languages, lexicalise the domain of motion in their verb roots. In addition, some crosslinguistic differences are noted: (a) English manner-of-motion verbs outnumber those of Spanish and tend to exploit some manner parameters much more often than Spanish manner verbs (e.g., manner information about the mental and physical state of the Figure and details about the way the Figure moves its legs while walking, motion using vehicles, motion while dancing); and (b) the Spanish path verb lexicon is larger in size than the English one, although both languages are able to express similar types of Paths.

The second part of this

thesis aims to investigate an important subdomain of motion, that of human locomotion, using e xperimental methods. Three studies are reported: a definition and feature listing task, a free verb listing task, and a verb- categorization rating task. These studies offer interesting insights into how English and Spanish organise their motion verb lexicons and into the complex semantics of human locomotion verbs. In addition, the findings provide empirical support for some of the observations from the linguistic analysis undertaken in the first part of this thesis, and they suggest that, rather than instantiating a single motor pattern, some motion verbs might better be considered as a combination of motor patterns.

Acknowledgements

The completion of this thesis has been possible thanks to the support of many people; people who set off upon this long journey with me and people whom I encountered along the path. First of all, I must thank my supervisor, Javier Valenzuela Manzanares, for his support and advice through the years; his guidance, kindness and friendship not only helped me to achieve the completion of the present work but also prepared me for the future. I am also grateful to the Cognitive Linguistics group at the University of Murcia for their encouragement and friendship, especially to Antonio Barcelona for counting on me as a research assistant during my last year as an undergraduate and for having me for four years as a graduate student. I owe to him my scholarly inspiration. Additionally, I thank my friends and research fellows for their constant moral support; I must express my gratitude to my friends from Pliego for not asking too often 'When are you finishing your PhD?' and to my research fellows, especially to Pilar Mompeán, for encouraging me with 'You are on track! Almost there!'

I am also grateful to the Spanish Mini

stry of Education and Science for their financial support (BES-2004-4450), especially during the three research stays which I spent at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA), at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and at the University of Lousiana at Lafayette (Lafayette, LA, USA). A big thank you to Dedre Gentner, Anetta Kopecka, Asifa Majid and Michele Feist for supervising me during these very productive research stays. I cannot show enough my gratitude for their sharing their time, for their support and for their stimulating comments. In particular, I am grateful to Anetta Kopecka and Asifa Majid for their guidance through all the steps of my first experimental study; without their help and advice I would not have been able to keep on track. Moreover, I would like to thank the Language and Cognition Lab at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and especially Michele Feist, for their feedback on my experimental studies, and for putting up with me so patiently during iii ivmy stay as well as for giving me the so needed support for going through the final stages of this dissertation. All of you are in every bit of this dissertation.

I would also like to thank the committ

ee for reading the results of my efforts along this journey, and Michele Feist for proofreading this volume. A tremendous thank you to all the participants who kindly volunteered to take part in my studies, to Georgina Oliver and Carmen Comeaux for running the English version of my studies, and to the Department of English Philology at the University of Murcia, particularly Raquel Criado, Lourdes Cerezo, María Dueñas, Ana Rojo, and Cristina Soriano, for letting me run the Spanish versions in their classes. Finally, but most importantly, I thank my family dearly for their support, love and unshakeable trust during all this time. My husband, Raimundo Martínez Manuel, provided me with the necessary faith, strength and courage to go through all the stages of this journey; he was my best fellow traveller along the uphills, downhills and twisted paths.

A BSTRACT ...................................................... ..................................i .................. iii T ABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................... .....................v L IST OF FIGURES AND TABLES...................................................... .........ix C HAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION...................................................... ............1

1.1. The problem ........................................................................

................................ 2

1.2. Aims and methodology........................................................................

............... 3

1.3. Outline of the thesis ........................................................................

.................... 5 C HAPTER 2. COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND THE THEORY OF LEXICALISATION ..................................9

2.1. An Overview of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Semantics................. 11

2.1.1. Introduction........................................................................

.................. 11

2.1.2. Cognitive Linguistics........................................................................

... 11

2.1.3. Cognitive Semantics........................................................................

.... 13

2.1.3.1. Main tenets and lines of research...................................................... 13

2.1.3.2. Conceptual Semantics....................................................................... 18

2.2. Talmy's theory of lexicalisation patterns........................................................ 23

2.2.1. Introduction........................................................................

.................. 23

2.2.2. The Motion Event........................................................................

........ 25

2.2.3. The three-way typology: the verb root................................................. 29

2.2.3.1. Lexicalisation pattern: Motion + Co-event....................................... 30

2.2.3.2. Lexicalisation pattern: Motion + Path............................................... 31

2.2.3.3. Lexicalisation pattern: Motion + Figure........................................... 32

2.2.3.4. Other minor patterns........................................................................

. 34

2.2.3.5. Split and parallel systems of conflation............................................ 36

2.2.4. The two-way typology: Path of motion............................................... 37

2.2.5. Typological shifts...............................................

.................................. 39

2.3. Typology revisited........................................................................

..................... 41

2.3.1. Introduction........................................................................

.................. 41

2.3.1. Equipollently-framed languages.......................................................... 42

2.3.3. Cline of Manner salience..................................................................... 43

2.3.4. Cline of Path salience...........................................

................................ 46

2.4. The Linguistic-Relativity Hypothesis.............................................................. 47

2.4.1. Introduction........................................................................

.................. 47

2.4.2. Sapir and Whorf's Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis........................... 49

2.4.3. Slobin's Thinking for Speaking........................................................... 53

C HAPTER 3. BEYOND LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGIES: CROSSLINGUISTIC STUDIES ON MOTION EVENTS...................................................... ........................56

3.1. Introduction........................................................................

............................... 57

3.2. Thinking-for-speaking research...................................................................... 58

3.2.1. Introduction........................................................................

.................. 58

3.2.2. Narrative style........................................................................

.............. 59

3.2.3. Translation........................................................................

................... 65

3.2.4. Sign languages and co-speech gestures ............................................... 69

3.2.4.1. Sign languages........................................................................

.......... 70quotesdbs_dbs6.pdfusesText_12

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