Semantic Categories in the Domain of Motion Verbs by

… in Turkish Linguistics. Istanbul: Bo˘ gaziçi, 2003

2020

This paper presents a theoretical approximation to the mental organization of language and therefore, to the existence of a mental lexicon where the lexical items of a language are stored and organized into semantic networks. These will be illustrated using a sample selection of motion verbs and making a contrastive analysis comparing the way English and Spanish shape these associations in a different way.

2011

Talmy‘s (1985) crosslinguistic typology of lexicalization patterns of motion events have been extensively used in second language acquisition (SLA) research as a means to examine how second language (L2) learners map form, meaning, and function. These studies have yielded some conflicting results regarding the learnability of L2 lexicalization patterns  arguably the oversimplification over and the overreliance on the dichotomous typological categorization of such patterns. The present corpus study seeks to illustrate how Japanese, which is classified as a Vlanguage, may express motion events differently from what the typology typically suggests. The results showed that (1) Japanese elaborates on the Manner of motion via nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and that (2) Japanese verbs conflate Manner and Motion via Chinese loanwords and compound verbs. In order to shed light on what is learnable and why certain lexicalization patterns are (un)learnable for specific population groups in ad...

We combine corpus driven linguistic knowledge with experimentally obtained sensorimotor data in an effort to better specify the minimum conceptual representation of a motion event that distinguishes it from all other events, which still are largely presented in a vague and not objectively calculated quantitative method. We use American English and Modern Greek data as a case study, in order to focus on the clustering of motor actions and its correspondence to previous linguistic classifications of both languages.

MOTION PREDICATES IN TURKISH: A MORPHO-SYNTACTIC TREATMENT, 2022

Research on space and language has had fruitful outcomes in the last decades. One of the related domains of study is motion itself, which is central to our experience. Although the work on the semantic analysis of motion events have had fruitful outcome in typological attempts to motion event encoding, a more recent approach to the field supports the idea that motion independent properties which govern the morphological, lexical and syntactic resources available to languages may determine the selection or tendency in motion framing of languages. The present study sets off to question this recent approach and focuses on actual motion events in Turkish from a structural point of view and investigates motion expressions in relation to subordination and case marking. It aims to understand what kind of case markings and subordinate expressions are used to encode motion events and to describe the relations, if any, between these structural elements and motion expressions. Apart from the structural investigation of motion expressions, the present study also addresses a preliminary analysis of fictive motion in Turkish, which is a totally different travel from the structural analysis. Two tasks were employed for the analysis of actual motion expressions and one task for the description of fictive motion expressions. Due to the nature of the content, no verbal expressions on it, and easy operability, The Pear film was taken as the first task of the study. A follow-up narrational experiment via a set of animated video clips was organized as the second task of the study. In the final section, a drawing task was administered to participants in order to account for the extent to which fictive motion is observable from the drawings. All the tasks are based on language production in their nature. The tasks were carried out online with individual participants (n=60), who are all native Turkish speakers. The findings of the study taken from both tasks found out that participants made use of certain subordinate constructions to elaborate their narrations of motion expressions. Three subordinate types were described from the frequently used ones to the least. Their relations with motion expressions were explained as encoding mainly the manner of motion; modifying the figure and/or ground elements of motion expressions. In regard to the use of case markings, three types of cases were observed in participants’ descriptions. The functions of these cases were linked to the translocational dynamics of motion expressions. The findings are in line with similar studies of its kind (e.g. Jackendoff 1990, 1996; Croft et al., 2010; Ibarretxe Antuñano, 2009 and Beavers et al., 2010) which suggest a flexible classification or continuum of motion typology since languages may exhibit more varied motion constructions than they are expected or proposed to in just two- or three-way typology. In terms of the fictive motion analysis, judging from the differences shown in drawings of fictive and non-fictive pairs, the present study suggests that there may be traces of fictive motion as if there was some form of motion effect, but further analyses are needed to make sure about that. Overall, apart from being the first investigation of fictive motion in Turkish, the present study can be regarded to contribute to the studies within the domain of motion in general and in Turkish in two ways: First, the present study tested the use of framework (by Beavers et al., 2010) which highlights the place of linguistic resources in encoding motion events in a language and as the findings suggest, that framework can be really beneficial in using linguistic resources for the analysis of motion events. Second, using tools rich of motion for the analysis of motion events, the present study can shed light on new insights which emphasize the clausal patterns in description of motion events in Turkish where path and manner verbs are used and even supported via additional uses of subordinate clauses for extended motion events and descriptions via case markings. Keywords: Motion events, framing typology, grammar and space, case marking, subordination, Turkish.

2020

In this present study, we analyze the Persian Motion Events from Talmy’s semantictypological standpoint which divide the world’s Languages into two frames based on Path (main-event). It is encoded by the main verb or the satellite (a closed-class category that includes any constituent other than a nominal complement that is in a sister relation to the verb root). In this study, Persian will be compared with English and Japanese as representative examples of Satellite-framed languages and Verb-framed languages to understand which group Persian belongs to. The analysis of data from the short story “Christmas Carol” shows that in Persian, encoding path shows a two framed way (like English/Japanese). It has also been observed that Persian also is similar to satelliteframed languages for encoding path. However, in expressing manner, Persian is similar to verb-framed Languages.

seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy's speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.

The Construal of Spatial Meaning, 2013

Setting the scene-the cognitive semiotics of motion The present paper argues that the lexico-grammar of spatial Motion (as a supercategory for dynamic movement and static location, cf. Talmy 1985) cannot be understood except as an integral part of the semiotic triad of reality, mind, and language. M otion in language should thus be explained on the basis of the (Gestaltist) psychology of motion in perception, in that language 'structures' the mind's construction of motion in reality. Accordingly, the typology of motion verbs is based on an experientially founded typology of motional situations in mind. A mental motional situation is perceptual, or 'pictorial': Human beings perceive motional situations in reality by forming (concrete) 'pictures' of them with diverse figureground constellations-and recognize them as belonging to different categories (according to stored percepts). There are two kinds of picture, viz. static, or 'stable', and dynamic, or 'unstable', roughly according as the figure is static or dynamic. Furthermore, we seem to be able to construct only one situational picture at a time. A single situational picture is a simple mental Situation-a stable picture is a 'state', and an unstable picture an 'activity'. So far the notion of M otion has been Perceptual. Now, it goes without saying that the 'mentality' of Situations involves much more than simple perceptual Situations, in that situations may be conceived of as possibly integrated with one another into 'complex' Situations. A "snapshot" of what at first sight might seem to be only a state or an activity may thus show out to be the endpoint or the starting point "window", respectively, on an integrated, complex Situation involving an Activity and a State, what will be called an Action. In the first case, the State in focus would be preceded by a causal Activity; in the second case the Activity in focus would be succeeded by a resultant State, in the normal course of events. The connection between the two simple Situations in a complex actional Situation is a general relation of telicity, the causal Activity tending to actually eventuate in the resultant State. The state-focused Action will be termed an Event, whereas an activity-focused Action will be termed a Process. Illustrating this, we may conceive of a scenario where I am sitting alone in the drawing room, then leave for the kitchen and come back, and lo and behold, you are sitting there! This may be conceived of as a M otion Situation, viz. a M otion Event, where you are sitting here as a result of your, say, returning home from work, and I may second it by the utterance Nå, du er kommet hjem fra arbejde 'oh, you've come home from work'. In this case the motion for me was only conceptual, in that I didn't see, or otherwise witness it, but only inferred it. We may thus talk about Conceptual motion in such cases. When now turning to language (as a system) and the typology of motion verbs in the mental lexicon, we must add the Sign Vehicle, i.e. the phonological expression, as a representation of Percean Firstness. The linguistic Sign Object (Secondness) and Sign Interpretant (Thirdness) then recall the mental perceptual and conceptual structures, respectively, just mentioned. So the sign contents are twofold , the linguistic cognitive-semantic domain being bipartitioned into an (abstract) perception-based 'imaginal' representation (cf. Spatial Structure in Jackendoff 2002) and an (abstract) conception-based 'ideational' representation (cf. Conceptual Structure in Jackendoff 2002). 1. Background, aims, and scope 1.1 Lexicalization typology M otion event research has grown into a well-established and highly productive field. Its theoretical cornerstone are the classic studies by Talmy (1975, 1985; for further refinements, see 2000: 25ff.), supplemented by works primarily by Slobin (e.g. 1996a/b; 2004a/b), but also by others (for an overview, see M ora Gutiérrez 2001). Despite the overwhelming amount of specific works within motion event research and despite the seemingly growing awareness of the need for a more fine-grained, less schematic approach than the Talmy-Slobin framework, the core assumptions and variables of the framework nevertheless are still upheld. Talmy's basic assumption is that even though people's pre-linguistic conceptualization of e.g. a directed M otion Situation appears to be universal-involving the same fundamental components to be lexicalized (apart from Figure and Ground, Motion itself, Manner of M otion, or Cause, and Path (i.e. trajectory), the ways of linguistically lexicalizing it in different languages are not the same because not all the components are able to be colexicalized in the same (verbal) morpheme in a major lexicalization system (Talmy 1985: 76): apart from cases where only M otion is lexicalized in the verb, as in English move, either the M anner component co-lexicalizes with the M otion component in the verb, leaving the Path behind to be lexicalized in a so-called Satellite, as in M anner languages, or it is the Path component that is lexically 'incorporated' into the verb, in so-called verb-framed or Path languages, whereby the M anner component becomes secondary, left for optional expression in a con-verb or adverb. Thus, we have a nice binary typology of major lexicalization patterns, and derivatively of languages, in that it is assumed that at least most languages fit into one of these types:  Manner (or, satellite-framed) languages, like e.g., Danish, Swedish, English, German, Russian, and Chinese, where only the Manner of motion is lexicalized in the verb root together with M otion, while the direction or Path of motion is explicated elsewhere when

Applied Psycholinguistics

This study examines how properties of path (the trajectory of motion) and manner (how an action is performed) components of motion events are reflected in linguistic and nonlinguistic motion event conceptualization in a path-focused language, Turkish. In two experiments, we investigated how path and manner differed in salience (i.e., prominence) and ease of expression (EoE, i.e., effort of describing), and how these factors were related to lexicalization and similarity judgments of motion events. In Experiment 1, participants rated motion events based on path and manner salience and EoE and expressed path and manner in a written format. Results indicated that manner was rated as more salient and path as easier to express. Path salience and EoE were related to both types (i.e., number of different expressions) and the total number of paths and manners used. However, manner EoE but not salience was associated with only types and the total number of manners used. In Experiment 2, parti...