When English Proposes What Greek Presupposes: The Cross-Linguistic Encoding of Motion Events

Autor/inn/en	Papafragou, Anna; Massey, Christine; Gleitman, Lila
Titel	When English Proposes What Greek Presupposes: The Cross-Linguistic Encoding of Motion Events
Quelle	In: Cognition, 98 (2006) 3, (13 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0010-0277
DOI	10.1016/j.cognition.2005.05.005
Schlagwörter	Greek; English; Narration; Language Styles; Language Patterns; Contrastive Linguistics; Motion + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Grieche; Griechisch; English language; Englisch; Sprachstil; Sprachmodell; Sprachstruktur; Linguistics; Kontrastive Linguistik; Bewegungsablauf
Abstract	How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry between the two languages, such that English speakers are overall more likely to include manner of motion information than Greek speakers. However, mention of manner of motion in Greek speakers' descriptions increases significantly when manner is not inferable; by contrast, inferability of manner has no measurable effect on motion descriptions in English, where manner is already preferentially encoded. These results show that speakers actively monitor aspects of event structure, which do not find their way into linguistic descriptions. We conclude that, in regard to the differential encoding of path and manner, which has sometimes been offered as a prime example of the effects of language encoding on nonlinguistic thought, surface linguistic encoding neither faithfully represents nor strongly constrains our mental representation of events. (Author).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10