Studie z Aplikované Lingvistiky (Dec 2018)
K tzv. sémantické typologii jazyků: Co česká slovesa pohybu mohou vypovídat o angličtině a španělštině || Towards semantic typology of languages: what Czech motion verbs tell about English and Spanish
Abstract
The paper is a corpus-based study of verbal encoding of Motion events in the cognitive semantics framework. First, it introduces Talmy’s semantic typology, based on the way languages code the key component of the Motion event, namely Path (Verb-framed languages encode it on the verbal root, Satellite-framed language outside of it). It then provides an overview of the experimental and typological research, which Talmy inspired, and an overall critical assessment of Talmy’s proposal. This is followed by a pilot study of Motion event encoding in Czech (which has not appeared in the typological studies so far). Relying on what Chestermann (2003, s. 318) calls T-universals, namely quantitative deviations from the target language norm (Altenberg a Granger, 2002, s. 40), I compare Czech (Satellite-framed) translations of English (Satellite-framed) and Spanish (Verb-framed) fiction texts in their ways of expressing boundary-crossing events. The analysis confirms the typological difference between English and Spanish by revealing a wider range of verbal lemmata with the Path prefix v(e)- [in] in the subcorpus of translations from English, but approximately the same number of the verb tokens is found in both subcorpora; this is due to a small number of high freqency low-manner verbs (coding “motion on foot”) in the translations from Spanish. A future comparison with non-translated Czech data might reveal intratypological differences (in the sense of Hijazo-Gascón a Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2013), namely between English and Czech.
