Manners of human gait: a crosslinguistic event-naming study

Abstract

Crosslinguistic studies of expressions of motion events have found that Talmy's binary typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages is reflected in language use. In particular, Manner of motion is relatively more elaborated in satellite-framed languages (e.g., in narrative, picture description, conversation, translation). The present research builds on previous controlled studies of the domain of human motion by eliciting descriptions of a wide range of manners of walking and running filmed in natural circumstances. Descriptions were elicited from speakers of two satellite-framed languages (English, Polish) and three verb-framed languages (French, Spanish, Basque). The sampling of events in this study resulted in four major semantic clusters for these five languages: walking, running, non-canonical gaits (divided into bounce-and-recoil and syncopated movements), and quadrupedal movement (crawling). Counts of verb types found a broad tendency for satellite-framed languages to show greater lexical diversity, along with substantial within group variation. Going beyond most earlier studies, we also examined extended descriptions of manner of movement, isolating types of manner. The following categories of manner were identified and compared: attitude of actor, rate, effort, posture, and motor patterns of legs and feet. Satellite-framed speakers tended to elaborate expressive manner verbs, whereas verb-framed speakers used modification to add manner to neutral motion verbs.

Verbs in speech framing expressions: Comparing English and Spanish

“…general purpose verbs such as say and tell than Spanish does. This is in stark contrast to the findings in Slobin et al (2014), who report the opposite pattern for verbs for motion in Spanish and English. In their data, based on a naming task, common core verbs such as go/ir, walk/andar and run/correr are far more common in Spanish than in English.…”

Finding categories through words: More nameable features improve category learning

“…It is not surprising to find that a language spoken in a culture lacking cars does not have the words "sedan" and "hatchback" as part of its core vocabulary. But substantially different patterns of naming are also found across much more fundamental domains including spatial relations (Haun, Rapold, Janzen, & Levinson, 2011;Levinson & Wilkins, 2006), time (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2011;Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010), common actions (Majid, Bowerman, van Staden, & Boster, 2007;Slobin, Ibarretxe-Antunanõ, Kopecka, & Majid, 2014), kin relations (Kemp & Regier, 2012;Murdock, 1970), body parts (Enfield, Majid, & van Staden, 2006), basic shapes (Luria, 1976;Roberson, Davidoff, & Shapiro, 2002), and colors (Gibson et al, 2017;Majid et al, 2018;Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005;Steels & Belpaeme, 2005).…”

Semantic Categorization of Placement Verbs in L1 and L2 Danish and Spanish

“…This has been shown for domains such as colors, emotions, artifacts, and topological relations (for recent reviews, see, e.g., Evans, ; Malt & Majid, ). Recently, research targeting semantic typology has turned its attention to event categorization, that is, the linguistic encoding of everyday events, such as carrying events (e.g., Bowerman, ; Saji et al., ), motion events (e.g., Malt et al., , ; Slobin, Ibarretxe‐Antuñano, Kopecka, & Majid, ), and cutting and breaking events (Majid, Gullberg, van Staden, & Bowerman, ; Majid, Boster, & Bowerman, ). The results of these studies have revealed cross‐linguistic differences in the number of semantic categories that are established and in their exact boundaries (i.e., how the events are grouped together).…”