Motion events assessed through the cognitive paradigm and the enactive pattern: two complementary approaches

Abstract

This article reports the results of a corpus-based investigation, which evaluates the way French and English native speakers depict motion events. Space markers’ distribution (prepositions, particles, etc.) is here assessed through the insertion of the selected items in French and English depictions. The inclusion of both languages’ space markers is scrutinized within French and English reports – both languages’ syntactic patterns illustrating the Talmian typology, which opposes English as a satellite-framed language to French as a verb-framed language. According to the hypothesis of this work, when one individual is made to describe some other individual’s motion experience, the linguistic structuring of her report is likely to be influenced by the physical activity she goes through before the descriptive task. This assumption implies that depicting identical phenomena can present language differences, if the speaker goes through a kinesthetic or a static physical performance before delivering her/his report. To test this hypothesis, two groups of speakers are interviewed and they are submitted to distinct sensorimotor constraints before describing the spatial progress of some other individual in the experimental scene. The individual’s spatial navigation to be described is identical in both groups. Through the non-linguistic variable of this investigation, the impact of speakers’ kinesthetic and stationary processes on the linguistic data collected is evaluated, hence assessing the potential relationships between two kinds of phenomena – linguistic and kinesthetic ones. Language is here apprehended through the enactive paradigm, according to which the experiential and sensorimotor dimensions contribute to the structuring of linguistic meaning.

Keywords

• typology
• space markers
• motion
• enactivism
• embodiment