A closer look at Paths of vision, Manner of vision and their translation from English into Spanish (2014) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2022. The interaction of motion event (sub)components in Spanish motion verbs
Spanish, as a Romance language, can be considered a verb-framed language in Talmy's (1985, 1991) framework or a head path-coding language in Matsumoto's (2003, 2020, this volume) terminology. This means that the information related to the Path of motion is usually encoded in the main verb. Following Talmy's (2000) framework, the semantic component of Path covers three subcomponents: Vector that includes different types of trajectories-source, goals, etc., Conformation or the shape or geometric complex of Path, and Deictic or the motion to/from speaker and addressee). These subcomponents are illustrated in examples (1-3) respectively. (1) Vector El chico entra en la tienda Lit. 'The boy enters in the shop' (2) Conformation El chico rodea la casa Lit. 'The boy goes.around the house' (3) Deixis El chico viene del colegio Lit. 'The boy comes of-the school' Other authors, however, argue that these subcomponents may be worth analyzing separately given their own role in the configuration of the motion event in some languages. Deixis is such an element. Matsumoto (this volume) summarises some of the reasons why Deixis should be considered a different semantic component. First, it is always lexicalised even in languages with poor path verb repertoires. Second, it often has its own independent morphosyntactic slot (e.g. certain position in a serial verb, specific affix, etc.). Third, the use of Path and Deixis across languages does not always correlate; that is, when comparing two languages, for example, they might behave similarly with respect to Path but they might not do so in the case of Deixis, or vice versa 1. As far as Spanish is concerned, Deixis does not have a special encoding slot different from any of the slots or resources available to codify information about other semantic components. In other words, Deixis can be expressed in main verbs such as 1 In order to avoid ambiguity in the use of the term Path (Talmy's view or Matsumoto's view), this paper will treat Path and Deixis as separate elements, unless specifically stated.
Fictive Motion in Spanish: travellable, non-travellable and path-related Manner information
This work is part of an on-going research (Rojo & Valenzuela ) aimed at elucidating the factors that enable a scene to be described in fictive motion terms. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the psycholinguistic reflection of two linguistic distinctions that occupy a prominent place in the literature on fictive motion . Our first experiment involves a self-paced reading task in which the grammatical subjects of fictive motion expressions are either "travellable" (e.g., paths, roads, etc.) or "nontravellable" (e.g., walls, fences, etc.). Our results show that Spanish speakers are sensitive to this travellable/non-travellable distinction, non-travellable objects being harder to process. In a second experiment, we investigate the types of manner information that can be included in a verb describing a fictive motion scene. According to Matsumoto's Manner Condition, when a fictive motion expression uses a manner-conflating verb, the information on manner conveyed by the verb must be path-related (that is, the manner of motion should describe some shape in the displacement). In order to test this condition, another self-paced reading task was designed in which Spanish participants read sentences which included verbs with path-related manner information (e.g., to zig-zag) or non-path-related manner information (e.g., to roll). Our results reveal that verbs including non-path-related manner information were harder to process.
The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, RCL, 2010
seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last 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 of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy's speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.
Epos : Revista de filología, 1999
1 =" th^ rro8 §-lineiiÍ8tic differences between En-In this paper I attempt ,o analyse he ero-ün^ .^ ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ gUsh and Spanish motion verb. from ^^''^¡''l^¿^^^_ I" "rder to do so, I shaU üghtonthedifficul,iestheypo.etotheSpan.sh.ra"sl^t^^^ _^ ^^^^^^^ foUow Langacker'.-^"-¿^ ,^1'Le. I differ fro. these authors in event-frame analysis (1985, 1988, IVV ; ^ j^d i" James (1980) may promy beUef thatthenewCo"trasnveA.a|y^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^ ^ ^^^ ^^^^^^ ve fruitful as a methodological tool. Ihereiore, analysis of verbs of movement in EngUsh and bpanisn.
Verbs of sensory perception: An English-Spanish comparison
Languages in Contrast, 2004
has pointed out the differences between Spanish and English verbs of motion with regard to the expression of elements such as "Path of motion" or "Manner of motion." Generally speaking, English verbs incorporate manner to their core meaning while Spanish verbs tend to incorporate Path, expressing Manner by means of an additional complement. Comparing English motion events and their translation into Spanish in several novels, Slobin found out that only 51% of English manner verbs were translated into Spanish manner verbs , the rest being neutralized or omitted.
«The Mental Lexicon: A Contrastive Analysis of Motion Verbs in English and Spanish»
2020
This paper presents a theoretical approximation to the mental organization of language and therefore, to the existence of a mental lexicon where the lexical items of a language are stored and organized into semantic networks. These will be illustrated using a sample selection of motion verbs and making a contrastive analysis comparing the way English and Spanish shape these associations in a different way.
Spanish constructions of directed motion – a quantitative study
Constructional Approaches to Language, 2016
In typological studies of expressions of motion events, there is a need for a quantitative methodology that assesses and qualifies inter-and intra-linguistic variation. The article reports from a large corpus study of the use of Spanish motion verbs in constructions of telic motion. Verb associations with the constructional V-slot were measured by using collostructional methodology (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003). Six categories of construction-specific variation were identified. The corpus data and broad evidence from other semantic domains suggest that the encoding of Spanish argument structure is verb-driven and that verb constraints versus schematicity is a typological parameter. The article concludes that Spanish is a verb-framing language rather than a verb-framed language (cf. Talmy, 2000), which explains the substantial variation observed. 1 I am grateful to several anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.
The translation of Motion events from Spanish into English: a cross-linguistic perspective
This study is based on the theoretical framework of conceptual transfer established by Jarvis (1998, 2007) and on the typology of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages developed by Talmy (1985, 2000). The relationship between conceptual transfer and the thinking for speaking hypothesis (Slobin, 1996b) is also considered. We show that conceptual transfer applies in the translation of lexicalisation patterns in Motion events from Spanish into English. Our informants are twenty Spanish speaking translation students who specialize in translation from Spanish/English, English/Spanish. They were faced with a series of ten sentences containing 7 examples including motion verbs and 3 distractors. The results seem to show that the translations from Spanish to English indicate a preference to follow the L1 lexicalisation pattern, coding Path in the main verb and Manner in a separate constituent, as opposed to the English lexicalisation pattern where Manner of Motion is conflated in a single lexical item and Path is indicated in a satellite. This misuse of the English pattern can be interpreted as an example of conceptual transfer. When conceptual transfer is at work non-target-like translations are produced. More attention needs to be paid to the different conceptual structures of motion events in both languages
Intralinguistic variation in the expression of motion events in English and Spanish
The present analysis focuses on Talmy's well-known lexicalization patterns for the expression of motion events . Languages are divided according to the preferred pattern they use; English, a satellite-framed language, encodes manner in the verb and path in a satellite (The bottle floated into the cave), whereas Spanish, a prototypical verb-framed language, encodes path in the verb, and manner in an adverbial or gerundive element, La botella entró a la cueva flotando (the bottle moved-in to the cave). Recent studies show that languages may show both encoding options , Filipovic 2007. In this paper I analyze corpus examples of verb-framed patterns in English and satellite-framed constructions in Spanish, and compare them to the preferred pattern in the other language. It is argued that the different rhetorical structure of each lexicalization pattern conveys a significant difference in meaning. This may explain why both encoding options co-occur within one language type.