A Typology of the Ground of Deictic Motion Verbs As Path-Conflating Verbs: the Speaker, the Addressee, and Beyond

Nakazawa, Tsuneko

doi:10.2478/v10010-007-0014-3

Cited by 14 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Typological literature maintains the consensus that when a motion event is expressed in a language, directional features are considered the "core" lexical element (Talmy 2003;Johnson 1987). At minimum, motion events require two elements: path, which indicates trajectory, and ground, which indicates a point of orientation for the figure (Brown & Gullberg 2010, Nakazawa 2007, Talmy 1991.…”

Section: Sgmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of language-specific and universal factors on acquisition of motion verbs

Smyder

Harrigan

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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This study explores children’s encoding of novel verbs referring to motion events, and finds influence of both language-specific and universal constraints on meaning. Motion verbs fall into two categories—manner verbs encode how a movement happens (run, swim), and path verbs encode the starting and ending point of a motion (enter, fall). Some languages express path more frequently in the verb (Spanish, Hebrew), and others manner more frequently (English, German). Our study expands on this previous work demonstrating sensitivity to these language-specific distributions, as well as expanding to test environmental factors representing a predictable universal distribution. We find that children are sensitive to both the language-specific factors as well as the universal factors in motion verb acquisition.

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Section: Sgmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of language-specific and universal factors on acquisition of motion verbs

Smyder

Harrigan

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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“…The set of licit perspective holders is a point of crosslinguistic variation: see(Gathercole, 1987) and(Nakazawa, 2007;Nakazawa, 2009) for cross-linguistic work on the topic.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Guess Who’s Coming (and Who’s Going): Bringing Perspective to the Rational Speech Acts Framework

Anderson¹,

Dillon²

2019

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“…Ir ("to go") differs from venir in that it denotes movement toward a goal and away from e.g., the speaker (Richardson, 1996;Lewandowski, 2007). These contrasts between perspectival restrictions on the use of come are observed not only in English and Spanish, but across a range of the world's languages, as illustrated by Gathercole (1978), Wilkins and Hill (1995), Lewandowski (2007), Nakazawa (2007Nakazawa ( , 2009, and the numerous references cited in these papers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Perspective-Taking With Deictic Motion Verbs in Spanish: What We Learn About Semantics and the Lexicon From Heritage Child Speakers and Adults

2021

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In English, deictic verbs of motion, such as come can encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions for venir (“to come”), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions. We face this question head on by investigating narrative productions of young Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, in comparison to English monolingual and Spanish dominant adults and children. We find that the young heritage speakers produce venir in linguistic contexts where most Spanish adult speakers do not, but where English monolingual speakers do, and also resemble those of young monolingual Spanish speakers of at least one other Spanish dialect, leading us to generate two mutually-exclusive hypotheses: (a) the encoding of speaker perspective in the young heritage children is cross-linguistically influenced by the more flexible and dominant language (English), resulting in a wider range of productions by these malleable young speakers than the Spanish grammar actually allows, or (b) the young Spanish speakers are exhibiting productions that are in fact licensed in the grammar, but which are pruned away in the adult productions, being supplanted by other forms as the lexicon is enriched. Given independent evidence of the heritage speakers' robust Spanish linguistic competence, we turn to systematically-collected acceptability judgments of three dialectal varieties of monolingual adult Spanish speakers of the distribution of perspective-taking verbs, to assess their competence and adjudicate between (a) and (b). We find that adults accept venir in contexts in which they do not produce it, leading us to argue that (a) venir is not obligatorily speaker-oriented in Spanish, as has been claimed, (b) adults may not produce venir in these contexts because they instead select more specific motion verbs, and (c) for heritage bilingual children, the more dominant language (English) may support the grammatically licensed but lexically-constrained productions in Spanish.

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A Typology of the Ground of Deictic Motion Verbs As Path-Conflating Verbs: the Speaker, the Addressee, and Beyond

Cited by 14 publications

References 15 publications

The influence of language-specific and universal factors on acquisition of motion verbs

The influence of language-specific and universal factors on acquisition of motion verbs

Guess Who’s Coming (and Who’s Going): Bringing Perspective to the Rational Speech Acts Framework

Perspective-Taking With Deictic Motion Verbs in Spanish: What We Learn About Semantics and the Lexicon From Heritage Child Speakers and Adults

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