This study examines motion events in the English and Spanish audio-described versions of the film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, pursuing two main research questions. First, to determine the ways in which linguistic typology and factors inherent to audio description (AD) have a combined impact on the lexicalization of motion events in the product of AD. Second, to identify the distinct features of the Thinking-for-audio-describing phenomenon. The preliminary results confirm the hypothesized impact mainly in terms of the expression of manner in the Spanish AD, and identify a series of compensations for Thinking-for-audio-describing through acoustic elements.
According to a localist theory of event semantics, event types such as state changes and realisation of actions are based on motion events, which are taken to be the primary type of event. The present paper investigates some claims of this theory, their consequences and conceptual foundations. It argues that the theory suffers from two flaws. First, the theory proposes parallels between event types that, upon closer scrutiny, appear to be absent. Second, it purports to derive time from motion, which is conceptually dubious, because motion presupposes time, while time does not presuppose motion. We propose that a more promising basis for a theory of events that attempts to generalise over event types is to ground event structure in the temporal domain. The foundational contrast between events would then not be motion and stationariness but rather the presence or absence of change, which is a ubiquitous, domain-neutral condition that is made possible by time.
This article is based on an empirical observation–the preference for expressing verticality in Danish when describing motion events. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of video-based, elicited data from native speakers of Danish in the domain of placement events (a subtype of motion events), this article supports that verticality, as a general rule, ranks highest in the hierarchy of possible semantic components that can occupy the slot for the post-verbal particle, and suggests some supporting and constraining factors that may impact the choice of making verticality explicit in Danish.
This article aims at contributing to the theoretical tools and metalanguage used for comparing how motion, and, specifically, the enterprise of moving from one place (Loc1) to another (Loc2), is expressed across different languages. The point of departure is the well-established typological distinction between manner (or satellite-framed) languages and path (or verb-framed) languages. Several researchers have emphasised the need for (a) a more consistent theoretical basis for distinguishing between linguistic expressions lexicalising motion in a broad sense from such that incorporate the semantics of going somewhere, i.e. from Loc1 to Loc2; and (b) a further specification and differentiation of the intuitively attractive but vaguely defined variables of manner and path. The suggested approach addresses these issues in combination by incorporating key insights gained on pre-linguistic visual cognition. That includes a distinction between perceptual and conceptual motion with implications also for how the corresponding universals may be differently conveyed in different languages. The primary aim is not to present any novel empirical observations or principles of categorisation of typological trends within and across particular languages. Instead, the article brings to fore certain insights on pre-linguistic motion detection which offer new perspectives also on how the outcome can be encoded linguistically.
The traditional Talmian binary typology of satellite-framed vs. verb-framed languages has proven to be insufficient for showing the diversity across the world's languages. One approach within post-Talmian motion typology follows Holistic Spatial Semantics, which has been applied to languages like Swedish, French, Thai and Telugu, but not to Slavic languages. This motivates the present research. We used "frog stories" and analysed translocative motion event descriptions, given by nine native speakers of Russian and seven of Bulgarian, all adults. The descriptions were first segmented into clauses and each clause was analysed with respect to the key categories of Path, Direction, Region and Manner. The results show that the two languages pattern differently, most significantly in the expression of Path and Manner. We conclude that Russian shares features of languages like Telugu by encoding Path by case markers, and features of languages as Swedish, through a predominance of Manner verbs. Bulgarian differs typologically from Russian by lacking cases and using motion verbs, either to express Path, similarly to French, or to express Manner, similarly to Swedish. These findings show that Slavic languages should not be simplistically placed within a single type and provide additional support for Holistic Spatial Semantics.
