The study examined the implications of Talmy motion event typology and Slobin’s thinking-for-speaking hypothesis for the context of Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilingualism. Uyghur and Chinese represent genetically distant languages (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) that nonetheless share important framing properties in the motion domain, i.e., verb-framing. This study thus aimed to establish how this structural overlap would inform bilingual speakers’ construal of motion events. Additionally, it sought to offer an “end state” perspective to a previous study on Uyghur–Chinese child bilinguals and to shed light on issues around the longevity of crosslinguistic influence. Thirty adult Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilinguals were invited to describe a set of voluntary motion events (e.g., “a man runs across the road”). Their verbalizations, alongside those from 24 monolingual Uyghur and 12 monolingual Chinese speakers were systematically analyzed with regard to the kind of linguistic devices used to encode key components of motion (main verb vs. other devices), the frequency with which the components are expressed together (Manner + Path) or separately (Path or Manner) and how they are syntactically packaged. The findings show that the bilinguals’ thinking-for-speaking patterns are largely language-specific, with little crosslinguistic influence. A comparison of our findings with previous studies on Uyghur-Chinese child bilinguals revealed no developmental change either in the analyzed aspects of motion descriptions or in patterns of crosslinguistic influence. As such, the findings lend support to accounts that propose crosslinguistic influence to be a developmental phenomenon.
Talmy’s motion event typology (Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Towards a cognitive semantics: Conceptual structuring systems, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has served as an influential framework for exploring event representation across languages. While confirming its basic premises, many studies argued that the typology cannot fully capture the vast intra- and inter-typological variations. Consequently, proposals have been made to expand the typology and/or reconceptualize it as a typology of constructional strategies for encoding events. This article furthers this line of inquiry by examining caused-motion expressions by adult speakers of an understudied Turkic language, Modern Uyghur. Systematic analyses of lexicalization patterns, that is, which components are typically selected for expression, how frequently they are selected, and how they are packaged in syntactic constructions, show that Uyghur is a prototypical verb-framed language. It differs most strikingly from English (considered satellite-framed) in terms of lexicalization patterns. Detailed comparisons with French and Turkish (putatively verb-framed) reveal intra-typological variations in that Uyghur speakers systematically used verb-framed constructions while French and Turkish speakers exhibit much flexibility and a general preference for satellite-framed constructions. Overall, our data lend support to Talmy’s typology conceived as a strategy-based typological framework.
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