Encoding Motion Events in Mandarin Chinese

Encoding Motion Events in Mandarin Chinese PDF Author: Jingxia Lin
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262977
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events, with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained classification and diagnostics of Chinese motion morphemes from the perspective of scale structure, but also the first to more comprehensively account for the ordering of Chinese motion morphemes. The findings of this study will not only enrich the literature on motion events, but more importantly, further our understanding of the nature of motion events and the way motion events are conceived and represented in the Chinese language. The major proposals and the cognitive functional approach of this work will also shed light on studies beyond motion. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in motion events, syntax-semantic interface, and typology.

Variation and Change in the Encoding of Motion Events

Variation and Change in the Encoding of Motion Events PDF Author: Juliana Goschler
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027270945
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The linguistic typology of motion event encoding is one of the central topics in Cognitive Linguistics. A vast body of typological, contrastive, and psycholinguistic research has shown the potential, but also the limitations of the original distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. This volume contains ten original papers focusing specifically on the variation and change of motion event encoding in individual languages and language families. The authors show that some of the central claims about motion event encoding need careful re-examination and reformulation and that individual languages and language families are more variable across space and time than even a refined typology could neatly capture at this time. The volume thus contributes to a more detailed and fine-grained foundation for the investigation of conceptual causes and consequences of different motion-event encoding strategies.

Broader Perspectives on Motion Event Descriptions

Broader Perspectives on Motion Event Descriptions PDF Author: Yo Matsumoto
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261067
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume, the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied, such as caused motion (e.g., kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g., look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis, a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined, including those spoken in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology, as well as the relationship between language and thought.

Cognitive Linguistics and Lexical Change

Cognitive Linguistics and Lexical Change PDF Author: Natalya I. Stolova
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027269866
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.

Events of Putting and Taking

Events of Putting and Taking PDF Author: Anetta Kopecka
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027275009
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Events of putting things in places, and removing them from places, are fundamental activities of human experience. But do speakers of different languages construe such events in the same way when describing them? This volume investigates placement and removal event descriptions from 18 areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages. Each chapter describes the lexical and grammatical means used to describe such events, and further investigates one of the following themes: syntax-semantics mappings, lexical semantics, and asymmetries in the encoding of placement versus removal events. The chapters demonstrate considerable crosslinguistic variation in the encoding of this domain, as well as commonalities, e.g. in the semantic distinctions that recur across languages, and in the asymmetric treatment of placement versus removal events. This volume provides a significant contribution within the emerging field of semantic typology, and will be of interest to researchers interested in the language-cognition interface, including linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

Caused Accompanied Motion

Caused Accompanied Motion PDF Author: Anna Margetts
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257868
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
This volume investigates the linguistic expression of directed caused accompanied motion events, including verbal concepts like BRING and TAKE. Contributions explore how speakers conceptualise and describe these events across areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the Americas, Austronesia and Papua. The chapters investigate such events on the basis of spoken language corpora of endangered, underdescribed languages and in this way the volume showcases the importance of documentary linguistics for linguistic typology. The semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion shows considerable crosslinguistic variation in how meaning components are conflated within single lexemes or distributed across morphemes or clauses. The volume presents a typology of common patterns and constraints in the linguistic expression of these events. The study of crosslinguistic event encoding provided in this volume contributes to our understanding of the nature, extent and limits of linguistic and cognitive diversity.

Linguistic Relativity in SLA

Linguistic Relativity in SLA PDF Author: Zhaohong Han
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 184769277X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Crosslinguistic influence is an established area of second language research, and as such, it has been subject to extensive scrutiny. Although the field has come a long way in understanding its general character, many issues still remain a conundrum, for example, why does transfer appear selective, and why does transfer never seem to go away for certain linguistic elements? Unlike most existing studies, which have focused on transfer at the surface form level, the present volume examines the relationship between thought and language, in particular thought as shaped by first language development and use, and its interaction with second language use. The chapters in this collection conceptually explore and empirically investigate the relevance of Slobin's thinking-for-speaking hypothesis to adult second language acquisition, offering compelling and enlightening evidence of the fundamental nature of crosslinguistic influence in adult second language acquisition "This is a landmark publication - the first to concertedly address the implications for SLA of Slobin's thinking-for-speaking hypothesis. Do processes of conceptualisation that L1s predispose speakers to affect their L2 production, and if so in what ways? Can we `re-think' for L2 speaking, and what cognitive abilities enable this? The research issues this book raises are fundamentally important for SLA theory and pedagogy alike." Peter Robinson, Professor of Linguistics and SLA, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan "Language affects how we think. Slobin's (1996) thinking-for-speaking hypothesis concerns the ways that native language directs speakers' attention to pick those characteristics of events that are readily encodable therein. In this impressive collection, Han and Cadierno marshal strong support for effects of native language upon second language use, i.e. for `rethinking-for-speaking'. A must-read for anybody interested in linguistic relativity and transfer in SLA." Nick Ellis, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, USA

Motion and Space across Languages

Motion and Space across Languages PDF Author: Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265364
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion, the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies, the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive, metaphorical) motion, and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition, translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation, experimentation, and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all, this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.

The Segmentation and Representation of Translocative Motion Events in English and Chinese Discourse

The Segmentation and Representation of Translocative Motion Events in English and Chinese Discourse PDF Author: Guofeng Zheng
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813340371
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This book provides a systematic, contrastive analysis of the segmentation and representation of English and Chinese Translocative Motion Events (TMEs), which possess Macro-Event Property (MEP). It addresses all the issues critical to understanding TMEs in English and Chinese, from event segmentation, MEP principles and the conceptual structure of TMEs and their constituents, to the representation of Actant, Motion, Path and Ground. The book argues that the corpus-based alignment for the TME segmentation in both languages, the parameters of Actant, Motion, Path and Ground and their relevant statistical description are particularly important for understanding English and Chinese TMEs. The linguistic materialization of Actant, Ground, Path and Motion, together with a wealth of tables and figures, offers convincing evidence to support the typological classification of English and Chinese. The book’s suggestions regarding the Talmyan bipartite typology and Bohnemeyer’s MEP contribute to the advancement of TME studies and language typology, and help learners to understand motion events and English-Chinese typological similarities and differences.

New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion

New Approaches to Slavic Verbs of Motion PDF Author: Viktoria Hasko
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027205825
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
This volume unifies a wide breadth of interdisciplinary studies examining the expression of motion in Slavic languages. The contributors to the volume have joined in the discussion of Slavic motion talk from diachronic, typological, comparative, cognitive, and acquisitional perspectives with a particular focus on verbs of motion, the nuclei of the lexicalization patterns for encoding motion. Motion verbs are notorious among Slavic linguists for their baffling idiosyncratic behavior in their lexical, semantic, syntactical, and aspectual characteristics. The collaborative effort of this volume is aimed both at highlighting and accounting for the unique properties of Slavic verbs of motion and at situating Slavic languages within the larger framework of typological research investigating cross-linguistic encoding of the motion domain. Due to the multiplicity of approaches to the linguistic analysis the collection offers, it will suitably complement courses and programs of study focusing on Slavic linguistics as well as typology, diachronic and comparative linguistics, semantics, and second language acquisition. "This important book is a model of in-depth exploration that is much needed: intra-typological, diachronic, and synchronic exploration of contrasting ways of encoding a particular semantic domain û in this case the domain of motion events. The various Slavic languages present contrasting but related solutions to the intersection of motion and aspect. And, as a group, they offer alternate forms of satellite-framed typology, in contrast to the more heavily studied Germanic languages of this general type. The up-to-date and interdisciplinary nature of the volume makes it essential reading in cognitive and typological linguistics."-Dan I. Slobin, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley "A feast for the mind, with untold riches and variety: different approaches, patterns and usage, diachronic as well as synchronic, Slavic and not just Russian. All on a high intellectual level from capable scholars. Ful besy were the editors in every thing, That to the feste was appertinent."-Alan Timberlake, Columbia University