Читать книгу Social research applied to english language teaching in Colombian contexts - Wilder Yesid Escobar Alméciga - Страница 13

With the idea of path established as a determining factor in typological classification, it becomes necessary to examine the manner in which each of the motion events is depicted and the implications of such in verb- and satellite-framed languages. Talmy (2000) refers to the manner of motion as a co-event, or an associated motion that often expresses the manner in which the event occurred. This type of lexicalization, prevalent in satellite-framed languages, permits the verb to express not only motion, but the manner of the co-event as well. As Talmy (2000) indicates, “the relation that the co-event bears to the main motion event is then indicated by a form like WITH-THE-MANNER-OF or WITH-THE-CAUSE-OF” (p. 29). This idea is best expressed by first referring to the simple expression of motion in (5a):

 (5a) The man moved across the room.

In this example, we can infer that a man began on one side of the room and arrived to the opposing side, yet noting is mentioned about the manner in which he completed the action. The verb to move used in (5a) is simply demonstrating movement, yet it does not convey the manner in which the movement occurred. However, in the following examples, English manner-of-motion verbs are used to elaborate not just the movement, but the manner in which the man moved across the room:

 (5b) The man danced across the room.

 (5c) The man ran across the room.

 (5d) The man snuck across the room.

 (5e) The man shuffled across the room.

As Talmy (2000) suggests, the idea that the man danced across the room can thus be interpreted as the following:

 (5f) [The man MOVED across the room] WITH-THE-MANNER-OF [The man danced].

From this example, the conflation of both manner and motion on the verb root in satellite-framed languages becomes evident. This phenomenon allows the speaker of a satellite-framed language such as English to interpret an event in such a way that the motion event and the co-event essentially become inseparable.

The conflation of manner and motion evidenced in the previous examples (5b-e), however typical in satellite-framed languages, is a syntactic construct that is considerably less ubiquitous in their verb-framed counterparts. Attempts to directly translate the previous sentences would result in phrases perceived as markedly cacophonous in native speech. As such, the following examples are provided to convey the difference in manner encoding in verb-framed languages, such as Spanish. Note that the sentences marked with an asterisk (*), although perhaps direct translations, express dissimilar interpretations of movement.

 (6a) El hombre atravesó la sala corriendo.

 (6b) El hombre atravesó la sala sigilosamente.

 (6c) El hombre atravesó la sala arrastrando los pies.

 (6d) El hombre corrió por la sala.*

 (6e) El hombre se arrastró por la sala.*

It is noted that the Spanish translations rely on an adverb or adverbial phrase to express the notion of WITH-THE-MANNER-OF. Furthermore, the sentences presented in (6d) and (6e), although grammatically correct, express a slightly different path of motion than their English counterparts. The motion expressed in (6d) is that of a man moving around within a room with the manner of running, not necessarily a completed movement from one side to the other as in (5c). Likewise, the movement communicated in (6e) conveys a dissimilar action to a native speaker of Spanish than that of the English equivalent seen in (5e).

To express the same movement of a man crossing a room, the manner of motion in examples (6a) through (6c) cannot be contained within the verb itself and is placed outside of the nucleus in an adverb or adverbial phrase. The consequence of the typological paradigm, as Ibarretxe-Antuaño (2012) suggests, is such that speakers of verb- and satellite-framed languages are motivated to communicate motion events in certain predetermined ways. This concept becomes apparent when considering the conceptualizations of movement expressed in (6d) and (6e) as opposed to their English counterparts.

It is not to say, however, that verb- and satellite-framed languages cannot contain both manner-of-motion and path-of-motion verbs. This, of course, is evidenced in the numerous grammatically-appropriate constructions of English and Spanish. Rather it is the frequency and diversity that is representative of a language that determines its specific motion-event constructions (Lemmens, 2005). In fact, work on linguistic typology makes specific reference to the characteristic expressions of language, maintaining that classification must be based on colloquial expressions that are both frequent and pervasive within quotidian speech (Talmy, 2000). As such, the English language may permit the phrase the mountain climber ascended the mountain and descended safely, akin to the Spanish example in (2a), yet this manner of speaking is often reserved for literary or perhaps high-brow discourse. The English verbs which make this type of path construction possible (e.g. to ascend, to descend) are most frequently Latinate in nature and, therefore, their path-conferring structure is borrowed from another language (Brown & Gullberg, 2010; Spring, 2010). Consequently, the verb constructions that prove to be both the most frequent and the most pervasive in the English language are those that appear in the form of the phrasal verb, often designating motion and manner directly on the verb and leaving path to be expressed in a satellite.