Abstract
Languages differ in the ways they divide the world. This study applies cluster analysis to understand how and why languages differ in the way they express motion events. It further lays out what the parameters of the structure of the semantic space of motion are, based on data collected from participants who were adult speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish. The participants described 37 video clips depicting a large variety of motion events. The results of the study show that the segmentation of the semantic space displays a great deal of variation across all three groups. Turkish differs from German and Danish with respect to the features used to segment the semantic space – namely by using vector orientation. German and Danish differ greatly with respect to (a) how fine-grained the distinctions made are, and (b) how motion verbs with a common Germanic root are distributed across the semantic space. Consequently, this study illustrates that the parameters applied for categorization by speakers are, to some degree, related to typological membership, in relation to Talmy's typological framework for the expression of motion events. Finally, the study shows that the features applied for categorization differ across languages and that typological membership is not necessarily a predictor of elaboration of the motion verb lexicon.
Highlights
While one can be buried in a kiste in Danish, it would be rather odd to be found six feet under in a Kiste in German
The motion event that might have led to this unfortunate situation could be described as Er balancierte auf einem Hochseil, conflating the act of walking and keeping the balance in German, whereas He was walking on a tightrope for English relies on the listener's world-knowledge to infer the keeping of the balance
The aim of the present study is to address the linguistic encoding of motion events with a specific focus on the semantics of motion verbs; i.e., it aims at discovering to what extent and in what respect languages vary in the lexical labels used to express motion events
Summary
While one can be buried in a kiste in Danish, it would be rather odd to be found six feet under in a Kiste in German. This has to do with the range of these cognate words in their respective languages. While in Danish a kiste relates more to a coffin than to a box, it only covers boxes in German. The motion event that might have led to this unfortunate situation could be described as Er balancierte auf einem Hochseil, conflating the act of walking and keeping the balance in German, whereas He was walking on a tightrope for English relies on the listener's world-knowledge to infer the keeping of the balance. Different languages offer different means of conveying how motion is expressed; i.e., motion events can be coded by various combinations of lexical items and grammatical morphemes.
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