Verbs in speech framing expressions: Comparing English and Spanish

Abstract

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish SPEECH FRAMING EXPRESSIONS (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, what lexical resources express these meanings, and how rich and varied these vocabularies are in the two languages. Secondly, the comparisons across the languages provide the basis for a theoretical contribution to the debate about general typological differences in the semantics and lexicalization patterns of verbs in Germanic and Romance languages to the area of verbs for speech and to meaning modelling in general. Five main semantic categories of verbs were identified: SPEECH, ACTIVITY, PERCEPTION, COGNITION and EMOTION. We show that Spanish features a much more varied repertoire than English and makes more use of verbs related to the domains of thinking and reasoning, while the physical domain is the preferred one in the English data set. It emerges that even though the same types of lexical resources are available in both languages, the ways of describing direct speech vary greatly.

Soundscapes in English and Spanish: a corpus investigation of verb constructions

“…Spanish has an even distribution between Producer and Experiencer, yet its frequent use of the latter perspective renders its users more inclined to explicate what is going on inside people's heads, and is therefore less dynamic. This tendency is also in line with what Caballero and Paradis (2018) found for s p e e c h events, where English narrators favour agentive and dynamic descriptions, while Spanish narrators tend to instruct readers about how to interpret the situation.…”

“…It was decided that sound related events describing speech in speech framing expressions of direct speech were not to be included, e.g., 'Bill said' or 'Sheila shouted'. Those specific speech contexts are accounted for in Caballero and Paradis (2018). On the basis of this preliminary work, we then designed the annotation schema to be used for the analysis of the data.…”

“…What is clear from those studies is that there is a rich flora of ways of describing s p e e c h in both languages. Also, after identifying five main categories of verb meanings (s p e e c h , a c t i v i t y , p e r c e pt i o n , c o g n i t i o n , and e m o t i o n ), Caballero and Paradis (2018) show that Spanish features a more varied vocabulary and makes more use of verbs referring to thinking and reasoning, while expressions evoking physical meanings are preferred in English. Consider an example from translations of English into Spanish (Caballero, 2015), in (3).…”

“…Comparisons between English and Spanish have also been carried out on speech framing expressions (Caballero 2015(Caballero , 2016Caballero & Paradis, 2018;Rojo & Valenzuela, 2001). What is clear from those studies is that there is a rich flora of ways of describing s p e e c h in both languages.…”

“…With this study, we aim at contributing to the still scarce research on s o u n d in the language sciences by describing how such events are portrayed through language in English and Spanish, two languages that are known to exhibit interesting typological differences with respect to how m o t i o n and s p e e c h events are represented in language (e.g., Caballero & Paradis, 2018;Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2017;Talmy, 2000). Their differences are highlighted in 2, where an English text has been translated into Spanish by a professional translator.…”