Language typologies in our language use: the case of ... - CiteSeerX

Language typologies in our language use: the case of Basque motion events in adult oral narratives* ˜ ANO IRAIDE IBARRETXE-ANTUN

Abstract This article confronts the typology of motion lexicalization proposed by Len Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000a) with elicited narrative data from Basque. According to Talmy’s typology, the characteristic expression of motion in Basque corresponds to that of verb-framed languages, where the semantic components of motion and path are conflated in the verb and the manner component is conveyed in a separate expression. On a packaging typology level such as Talmy’s, Basque is adequately classified in this group; however, when we look at the description of motion events in language use a` la Slobin (1987, 1991, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2000a), at how the semantic components of path and manner are elaborated in real narratives, the picture changes. As far as manner is concerned, Basque behaves as expected for verb-framed languages such as Spanish with a scarce and poor description of this component, but with respect to path, Basque shows a di¤erent behavior. The description and elaboration of this semantic component is so pervasive and rich that Basque seems to be more similar to satellite-framed languages such as English than to those akin to its group. This tendency cannot be considered an individual-based feature but a typological one, and consequently, we suggest that Talmy’s typology needs to be revised. In order to support this claim, we present data from L1 Basque Frog Stories and compare them with English and Spanish ones. In addition, we also use data from Basque novels and L2 Basque Frog Stories. Keywords:

motion lexicalization; thinking-for-speaking; Basque; Frog Stories.

1. Lexicalization patterns in motion events A great deal of Talmy’s work is devoted to the study of cross-linguistic lexicalization patterns, that is, to the investigation of how particular Cognitive Linguistics 15–3 (2004), 317–349

0936–5907/04/0015–0317 6 Walter de Gruyter

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I. Ibarretxe-Antunãno

meaning components are regularly associated with particular morphemes in di¤erent languages (2000b: 24). This association between meaning components and particular morphemes—‘‘surface elements’’ in Talmy’s terminology—is not a one-to-one correspondence across language types, but one of multiple possibilities. Languages may follow di¤erent packaging strategies as Talmy himself hypothesizes: A combination of semantic elements can be expressed by a single surface element, or a single semantic element by a combination of surface elements. Or again, semantic elements of di¤erent types can be expressed by the same type of surface element, as well as the same type by several di¤erent ones. (2000b: 21)

However, languages do not seem to follow a wide and diverse range of packaging strategies in the association of semantic components with surface elements. Talmy (1991, 2000a) reduces the possible combinations to two main patterns on the basis of how languages encode the core information of a semantic domain onto syntactical and lexical structures. One pattern allocates the core information to the verb, and the other does so to some other elements called ‘‘satellites’’.1 ‘‘Verb-framed languages’’ are those that follow the first strategy and ‘‘satellite-framed languages’’ those that follow the second one. In the case of motion events, Talmy suggests that the basic information is the motion of an entity along a path in a specified direction.2 In satellite-framed languages like English, the verb does not encode this information. Instead, it usually expresses the act of motion itself conflated with information about manner, that is, information about the way in which motion is performed. For example, consider verbs like run, jump, and crawl. Path information is usually expressed in satellites such as out, into, down, as in run out, jump into, and crawl down. Verb-framed languages like Spanish, on the other hand, follow the opposite strategy. Here, the core information is not expressed in a separate element but usually conflated with the verb, e.g., bajar ‘go down’, entrar ‘go in’. The encoding of manner is an optional choice in Spanish and, thus, is expressed in a separate element, e.g., salir corriendo ‘go-out running’. In order to classify a language as verb-framed or satellite-framed, we need to look at its ‘‘characteristic expression of motion’’. By ‘‘characteristic’’, Talmy (1985: 62; 2000b: 27) means that (1) it is colloquial in style, rather than literary, stilted, and so on; (2) it is frequent in occurrence in speech, rather than only occasional; (3) it is pervasive, rather than limited—that is, a wide range of semantic notions are expressed in this type.

Motion lexicalization in Basque

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In the case of Basque, its ‘‘characteristic expression of motion’’ would place it within the verb-framed group, as illustrated in (1). (1)

eta erlauntzatik erle guztiak irten and beehive:abs bee all:abs:det:pl exit:perf hegaka [B20i] flying ‘. . . and all the bees flew out from the beehive.’

ziren aux

As expected for verb-framed languages, the verb irten ‘exit’ in (1) conveys motion and path, and manner is expressed in a separate expression, an adverb hegaka ‘flying’. The information that manner expressions add to the whole motion event is quite varied. It can refer to the motor pattern, e.g., arinka ‘running’, arrastaka ‘dragging’, taka-taka ‘small steps’; the rate or speed of motion, e.g., bizkor ‘quickly’, ziztu bizian ‘fast’; the means of transport, e.g., oinez ‘on foot’; and the protagonist’s inner state, e.g., txintxo-txintxo ‘well-behaved’, zain-zain ‘watchful’. As we can see from these examples, not only is the information conveyed in these expressions diverse, but also the grammatical category of these ‘‘separate expressions’’. Adverbs (bizkor ‘quickly’), adjectives (txintxo ‘well-behaved’), postpositional phrases (oin-ez [foot-instrumental case] ‘on foot’), and even sound symbolic expressions (taka taka ‘small steps’) are used in this slot.3

2. Thinking for speaking: Language typologies in our language use The typological di¤erences across languages described in the previous section show that languages have di¤erent syntactic-semantic preferences for when their speakers want to talk about motion. The detailed description of these preferences in several languages is an interesting exercise because it contributes to what authors such as Myhill (1992: 1–2) have called ‘‘typological discourse analysis’’. That is to say, ‘‘the cross-linguistic study of the factors a¤ecting the choice of one construction or another in a given language, taking the surrounding discourse context into consideration as having a crucial e¤ect on this choice’’. However, these language-specific patterns are important not only for their typological discourse implications—how speakers of di¤erent languages narrate the same story—but also for their cognitive implications. As Berman and Slobin (1994: 612) argue, these discourse di¤erences ‘‘suggest that the native language directs one’s attention, while speaking, to particular ways of filtering and packaging information’’. With this idea in mind, Slobin (1987, 1991, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2000a) has put

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forward what he calls the ‘‘thinking for speaking’’ hypothesis, a modified version of the classical Sapir-Whorf debate on linguistic relativity of the first half of the twentieth century (Sapir 1924; Whorf 1940).4 Slobin himself explains the core motivation for this hypothesis in the following way: The expression of experience in linguistic terms constitutes thinking for speaking—a special form of thought that is mobilised for communication. . . . We encounter the contents of the mind in a special way when they are being accessed for use. That is, the activity of thinking takes on a particular quality when it is employed in the activity of speaking. In the evanescent time frame of constructing utterances in discourse one fits one’s thoughts into available linguistic frames. ‘‘Thinking for speaking’’ involves picking those characteristics of objects and events that (a) fit some conceptualisation of the event, and ( b) are readily encodable in the language (Slobin 1991: 12)

In other words, experience cannot be verbalized without having taken a specific perspective influenced, if not determined, by the typological characteristics and lexicalization pattern of a given language. What we experience/perceive might be the same event but the way we choose to talk about it seems to be di¤erent across languages. This is why for Slobin (1996a), any event (in our case, a motion event) can be described in terms of two di¤erent cognitive frames. On the one hand, that which refers to the actual event or experience that we want to describe (the translational motion from one place to another), and on the other, the tools provided for and constraints imposed on speakers in expressing that event in a particular language. These are what he calls a ‘‘discourse frame’’ and a ‘‘typological frame’’, respectively. If Slobin’s hypothesis is right, then these di¤erences within the typological frame ought to be readily present when we analyze the same type of event in di¤erent languages. As stated in the previous section, satelliteframed languages and verb-framed languages di¤er in the way they lexicalize the motion semantic components of path and manner. S-languages encode some change of location in a particular manner, leaving it to satellites (particles and prefixes) to encode directionality, whereas V-languages do exactly the opposite.5 But, how can we empirically show the di¤erences between them? In a paper from 1996, Slobin (1996a) proposes a series of ‘‘clues’’ or ‘‘areas’’ where these typological di¤erences in the lexicalization of motion events among S-languages and V-languages may become clear. Let us summarize each of them:

Motion lexicalization in Basque i.

ii.

iii.

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The first one is related to the number, expressiveness, and frequency of mention of lexical items for the description of manner. The proposal is that V-languages have fewer and less expressive items than S-languages. The second one deals with the elaboration of ground descriptions, that is, the description of source, medium, milestone, and goal. The assumption is that V-languages have less frequent and elaborated ground descriptions than S-languages. The third one has to do with the rhetorical style of these narratives. The hypothesis is that V-languages devote less narrative attention to the dynamics of movement and more to the static description of scene setting than do S-languages.

These proposals were developed on the basis of English and Spanish, two languages that can be taken as characteristic or prototypical for these two di¤erent typological groups, i.e., S-languages and V-languages, respectively.6 As discussed in the previous section, Basque is classified among the latter, and as a consequence we would expect the characteristics that apply to Spanish to be valid for Basque as well. That is to say, Basque should have a small, infrequent, and not very expressive lexicon for manner, describe the ground only occasionally and not very elaborately, and devote most of the narrative attention to a description of the scene setting. In the following section, we analyze each of these proposals in more detail and confront them with Basque oral data. As we will see, with respect to manner, Basque behaves as expected for verb-framed languages such as Spanish, in that this component is relatively poor, but in contrast, as far as path is concerned, Basque manifests di¤erent patterns. The description and elaboration of this semantic component is so pervasive and rich that Basque seems to be more similar to satellite-framed languages such as English than to those belonging to its group. In order to make these similarities and di¤erences more evident, I always contrast Basque with English and Spanish data. The Basque data come from fifteen elicited narratives by adult Basque native speakers from di¤erent dialect areas.7 In gathering these data, I followed Berman and Slobin’s (1994) procedure for the Frog Stories. Informants were videotaped narrating the story of the wordless picture book, Frog Where Are You? (Mayer 1969).8 English and Spanish data are mainly drawn from Slobin’s own work, especially from his 1996 article, ‘‘Two ways to travel’’. In the case of Spanish, I have also used the Spanish Frog Stories data compiled by Aurora Bocaz in Chile and Argentina, and Eugenia Sebastiań in Spain.9

322 3. 3.1.

I. Ibarretxe-Antunãno Applying Slobin’s proposals to Basque Frog Stories Verbs and lexical items for manner description

The first step that Slobin takes in his analysis of the typological frame of motion events is to look at the entire collection of motion verbs—both caused and self-movement—used in the Frog Stories. He argues that one of the main di¤erences between English (S-languages) and Spanish (Vlanguages) lies in the number and type of motion verbs that these languages use. The former has a richer and more expressive motion-verb lexicon than the latter, as illustrated in (2a) and (2b) respectively. (2)

a.

b.

English verbs [S-96a] buck, bump, buzz, carry, chase, climb, come, crawl, creep, depart, drop, dump, escape, fall, float, fly, follow, get, go, head, hide, hop, jump, know, land, leave, limp, make-fall, move, plummet, pop, push, race, rush, run, slip, splash, splat, sneak, swim, swoop, take, throw, tip, tumble, walk, wander Spanish verbs [S-96a] acercarse ‘approach’, alcanzar ‘reach’, arrojar ‘throw’, bajar(se) ‘descend’, caer(se) ‘fall’, correr ‘run’, dar-un-empujoń ‘push’, dar-un-salto ‘jump’, entrar ‘enter’, escapar ‘escape’, hacer caer ‘make fall’, huir ‘flee’, ir(se) ‘go’, llegar ‘arrive’, llevar(se) ‘carry’, marchar(se) ‘go’, meterse ‘insert oneself ’, nadar ‘swim’, perseguir ‘chase’, ponerse ‘put oneself ’, regresar ‘return’, sacarse ‘remove oneself, exit’, salir ‘exit’, saltar ‘jump’, subir(se) ‘ascend’, tirar ‘throw’, traspasar ‘go over’, venir ‘come’, volar(se) ‘fly’, volver(se) ‘return’.

According to Slobin’s (1996a) data, the English narratives include a total of 47 motion verbs and the Spanish narratives 27. But let us look at (2c) to see how many verbs are used in Basque narratives. (2)

c.

Basque verbs abiatu ‘set o¤ ’, agertu ‘appear, turn up’, ailegatu ‘arrive’, airatu ‘fly’, alde egin ‘leave’, aldendu ‘leave, move away’, altxatu ‘raise, get up’, astindu ‘shake’, ateatu ‘go out the door’, atera ‘go/take out’, atzera egin ‘go backwards’, aurreratu ‘go forward’, azaldu ‘turn up, appear’, bidali ‘send o¤ ’, bota ‘throw’, bueltatu ‘return’, desagertu ‘disappear’, eragin ‘cause to do something, move’, erakarri ‘cause to bring’, eraman ‘carry’, erori ‘fall’, eskapatu ‘flee’, eskumarantz egin ‘go towards the right’, eten egin ‘stop’, etorri ‘come’, frenatu ‘brake, stop’, gelditu ‘stop’ (remain), gora egin ‘go up’, heldu ‘arrive’, hurbildu ‘approach’, ibili


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‘walk’, igo ‘go up’, ihes egin ‘escape’, inguratu ‘go around, get close’, iritsi ‘arrive’, irriste egin ‘slide, slid’, irten ‘go/take out’, itzuli ‘return’, jarraitu ‘follow to’, jarri ‘put in’, jausi ‘fall’, jo ‘set o¤, head’, joan ‘go’, kanpora egin ‘go outside’, kendu ‘remove’, korrika egin ‘run’, lurreratu ‘go down’, makurtu ‘bend’, montatu ‘mount’, mugitu ‘move’, oheratu ‘go to bed’, pasatu ‘go beyond, pass’, paseatu ‘stroll’, saltatu ‘jump’, salto egin ‘jump’, sartu ‘enter/put inside’, segitu ‘follow’, zutitu ‘stand up’. Surprisingly enough we find that Basque displays the highest number of verbs with 58. Although this figure seems at first sight to contradict Slobin’s proposal, this is not quite so. In order to understand the real meaning of this number, we need to take into account the possibilities and resources Basque has for vocabulary creation and extension. In the list in (2c), we can observe the following: i.

conflation of path with motion, as typical of verb-framed languages, e.g., igo ‘ascend’, sartu ‘enter’ ii. locative noun and the verb egin ‘make’, e.g., alde egin ‘leave’10 iii. locative noun together with an allative or directional allative case paired with a verb like egin ‘make’, e.g., gora egin ‘go up (above-all make)’, eskuma-rantz egin ‘go right (right-dir.all make)’ iv. locative noun with allative and a verbal su‰x, e.g., lurre-ra-tu ‘go down (ground-all-suf)’, aurre-ra-tu ‘go forward (front-all-suf) v. Romance loans, e.g., ailegatu ‘arrive’, bueltatu ‘return’ vi. Pairs of synonyms, e.g., iritsi and heldu ‘arrive’11 The possibility of using all of these strategies to convey this type of verb allows for a very rich lexicon. For instance, if we wanted to say ‘go out’ in Basque, we have the opportunity of choosing from among four di¤erent possibilities: atera, irten, kanpo-ra egin, and kanpo-ra-tu, as well as a construction like the English go out with the locative noun (kanpo ‘outside’) plus the allative and the verb joan ‘go’, i.e., kanpo-ra joan ‘go outside’.12 This strategy applies not only to path verbs but also to manner verbs. For instance, there are two di¤erent verbs for ‘jumping’ in the list above, saltatu and salto egin. In the first case, the verb is formed with a verbal su‰x -tu, whereas the other case is a complex predicate created by combining the verb egin ‘make’ with a nominal indicating the kind of action performed (‘jumping’). If our verb count was not based on the di¤erent lexical items that we find in these stories but rather on di¤erent meanings, the Basque list would contain 41 di¤erent items instead of the 58 mentioned above, a

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number lower than that for the English verbs but still higher than for the Spanish verbs. According to Slobin, another possible reason for these di¤erences in the number of verb types can be found in the possibility in satelliteframed languages of conflating motion and manner within the verb. In his own words: It is as if the availability of the combined slot for MOTION and MANNER in Slanguages has encouraged speakers to elaborate the entries in this slot. There is no additional ‘‘cost’’ to adding richer manner expressions, since the slot must be filled by some verb or other in order for a syntactically complete sentence to be produced. By contrast, the optional slot for MANNER expression in a V-language has some ‘‘cost’’, in that it adds an element or phrase to the sentence. Thus it is retained for situations in which manner is truly at issue—because it is unexpected or unusual (Slobin 2000a: 113)

This statement is supported by the data in (2). There are 31 di¤erent types of manner of motion verbs in the English list, that is, 65 percent of the total. The percentage of manner of motion verbs in both Basque and Spanish is indeed much lower. Basque has eleven types (or 23 percent)13 and Spanish nine types (30 percent). Another piece of evidence comes from a short experiment carried out with American undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley (Slobin 2000b) which I have reproduced with Basque first-year undergraduates at the University of the Basque Country. The procedure is straightforward: students, 26 in each group, are asked to write down as many motion verbs as they can in one minute. The results are revealing. Berkeley students produced a total of 106 di¤erent motion verbs, of which only 14 are neutral (go, move) or path verbs (enter); the rest contain some information about the manner of motion. Basque students produced a total of 61 di¤erent motion verbs. The results show a di¤erent tendency; there are 24 manner verbs, and the rest are neutral or path ones. Table 1 summarizes these results.14 The di¤erence between these languages, however, does not only lie in the number of manner-of-motion verb types, but also in the expresTable 1. Comparison of verbs elicited from American and Basque undergraduates

Manner of motion Neutral þ Path Total

Berkeley students

Basque students

92 (86%) 14 (13%) 106

24 (39%) 37 (61%) 61


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siveness of such verbs. Slobin (1997: 459) argues that manner verbs in Slanguages are more expressive than those in V-languages. Once again, the data confirm this hypothesis. Basque and Spanish manner of motion verbs are all first-tier verbs, i.e., neutral and everyday verbs such as running (korrika egin, correr) or jumping (salto egin, saltar), whereas in English, manner of motion verbs are very detailed and describe very specific movements ( plummet, splat, swoop). In fact, in a recent article, Slobin (2000a: 119) lists the following seven di¤erent semantic categories of manner-of-motion verbs in English: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii.

Rapid motion: bolt, burst, dart, plunge, race, run, rush, scramble, skitter, sprint Leisurely motion: drift, loiter, stroll, wander Smooth motion: brush, glide, slide, slip Obstructed motion: stumble, trip Furtive motion: crawl, creep, sneak Manners of walking: march, plod, step, stride, tiptoe, tramp, walk Manners of jumping: jump, leap, spring

Neither the Basque nor the Spanish motion-verb lexicon has an equivalent for each of these English verbs. We might find some distinctions in the ‘‘leisurely motion’’ category in Spanish in the verbs andar ‘walk’, caminar ‘walk, stroll’, and pasear ‘go for a walk, stroll’, where caminar implies more leisure than andar but less than pasear; or in the ‘‘rapid motion’’ category in Basque in verbs like ihes egin ‘escape’ and ospa egin ‘escape very rapidly’. But for most cases Basque and Spanish need to resort to separate expressions to convey these rich and fine distinctions. 3.2.

Elaboration of ground

The second proposal concerns the elaboration of ground, that is to say, the description of the environments of source–starting point, goal– intended destination, milestone–secondary goal, and medium–path. Slobin proposes that V-languages have less frequent and elaborated ground descriptions than S-languages. In order to test this proposal, Slobin focuses his analysis on three areas: (i) the presence or absence of ground phrases, (ii) the number of ground elements per verb (complex paths or journeys) and (iii) the degree of event granularity. Let us have a look at these three elements. 3.2.1. Presence or absence of ground phrases One of the problems when comparing and contrasting motion events in typologically di¤erent languages is that what is expressed in a single

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expression in one language requires or is equivalent to more than one in another language. This is the case with the Spanish verb caer(se). As Slobin observes, the verb caer(se) has two translations in English: fell and fell down. The important factor at play in this case is not the translation per se, but the fact that English o¤ers two somehow di¤erent possibilities. The first one is the use of a ‘‘bare’’ verb, i.e., a verb that ‘‘provides no elaboration of path beyond the inherent directionality of the verb itself ’’ (Slobin 1996a: 200). The second possibility is the use of a motion verb plus additional path information in the satellite. The first possibility is obviously the most common choice in V-languages (or at least in Spanish, as we will show later), the information about the path is already given in the verb so there is no need to add an ‘‘extra’’ particle like down in order to convey this information. This particle is, however, compulsory in S-languages since that is the ‘‘slot’’ reserved for path information. If we were to test Slobin’s proposal for ground description on the basis of bare verb usage, we would find that these are much more detailed and richer in S-languages than in V-languages. This is indeed what Slobin finds in his data from downward motion descriptions in the Spanish and English Frog Stories.15 But to some extent, these data are misleading. As Slobin points out, if we formed two groups on the basis of bare verb usage, it would imply that verbs with descriptions of path such as down or in the water were considered as belonging to the same group, the nonbare verb group. However, as we can see from these expressions, the information they convey is not the same, whereas down refers to downward movement, in the water gives us more explicit information about the ground (goal). The other di¤erence is that the downward information in down is already expressed in the verb caer(se), while in the water needs to be expressed in a separate expression in Spanish as well: en el agua. In order to solve this problem, Slobin (1996a: 201) proposes analyzing the elaboration of ground in terms of ‘‘minus-ground clauses’’ and ‘‘plusground clauses’’. The former include bare verbs and verbs with satellites indicating direction of movement. The latter have in addition one or more phrases encoding source and/or goal. Slobin finds that the rate of use of minus-ground clauses in English is very low, only 18 percent, compared to 82 percent for plus-ground clauses. Spanish shows a more balanced use, 37 percent minus-ground and 63 percent plus-ground clauses. In other words, it seems that the general tendency for English narratives is to include more ground elaboration with motion verbs than in Spanish. Basque, as a V-language, should pattern with Spanish and therefore present similar percentages. However, this is not what happens. Basque

Motion lexicalization in Basque Table 2.

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Minus-ground and plus-ground clauses in Basque motion verbs

Scenes

Dog scene (12) Bee scene (12) Boy scene (13) Deer scene (22) Total (59)

Minus-ground

Plus-ground

‘fall’

total

‘fall’

‘throw’

‘go’

‘jump’

no verb

total

2 4 1 —

2 4 1 — 7 (11%)

8 5 9 13

— 2 2 6

2 2 — 2

— — — 1

— — 1 —

10 8 12 22 52 (88%)

percentages do not correspond to what Slobin reports as the general tendency for V-languages. The use of minus-ground clauses in Basque is very low; in fact, at 11 percent, it is even lower than in English. The use of plus-ground clauses, on the other hand, is correspondingly high, 88 percent. Table 2 summarizes the occurrence of minus-ground and plusground phrases in motion verbs in the four falling scenes in the Frog Stories.16 What is more, as can be observed in Table 2, and contrary to what Slobin (1997: 455) proposes for V-languages, the type of motion verb it occurs with does not condition this pervasive description of ground. In other words, neutral verbs like joan (jun) ‘go’ (example [3]), path verbs like jausi ‘fall’ (example [4]), and manner verbs like salto egin ‘jump’ (example [5]), appear with ground descriptions. (3)

(4)

(5)

Azkenean, habixe, erleabixe, lurrera jun finally nest:abs beehive:abs ground:all go:perf zizan [B20d] aux ‘In the end, the nest, the beehive went down to the ground:’ Bapatean, erlauntza lurrera jausi . . . [B20i] suddenly beehive:abs ground:all fall:perf ‘Suddenly, the beehive falls down to the ground . . .’ Zakurrak ere zuhaitzen gainera salto egin dog:erg also tree:poss top:all jump make:perf duela dirudi. [B20f ] aux:comp seems ‘It seems that the dog has also jumped onto the tree.’

3.2.2. Number of ground elements per verb: Journeys After the analysis of clauses, Slobin examines a more realistic narrative description of motion that includes more than just source and goal. As he argues, narrators in real narratives ‘‘need not limit a path description to a

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single verb and its adjuncts [ . . . , they] may present a series of linked paths or a path with way-stations’’ (1996a: 202). In order to examine this, he proposes a new ‘‘unit of analysis’’, which he calls a ‘‘complex path’’ or ‘‘journey’’, i.e., an extended path that includes milestones or sub-goals situated in a medium.17 In the case of S-languages, Slobin argues that narrators tend to mention several pieces of information about the ground, as illustrated in the following English example. (6)

He starts running and he tips him o¤ over a cli¤ into the water.[S-96a]

In (6), there is information about a milestone (over a cli¤ ) and the goal of motion (into the pond ). These two pieces of information are attached to a single verb. For V-languages, on the other hand, Slobin reports that there is a tendency to limit the description of ground to one piece of information only, and that examples such as (7), where both source and goal are expressed appended to one verb, are quite rare in Spanish.18 (7)

El perro . . . hace un movimiento tal que se the dog makes one movement such that it.refl precipita al suelo, desde la ventana. plummets to.the ground from the window ‘The dog . . . moves, plummeting to the ground from the window’

Although the one-ground-element-per-verb limitation seems to be true for Spanish, what we find in Basque narratives contradicts this tendency. Let us look at examples (8), (9), and (10): (8)

(9)

(10)

hor basauntzatik erori da mutiko lurria [B20g] there deer:abl fall:perf aux boy:abs ground:all ‘There, the little boy falls from the deer to the ground.’ eta halako baten bota egin dauz and that:adn one:loc throw:perf emp aux handik lurrera. [B20e] over.there:abl ground:all ‘And suddenly [the deer] throws them from there to the ground.’ danak amildegitikan behera erori zian ibai all.abs cli¤:abl:loc below:all fall:perf aux river batera. [B20b] one:all ‘All of them fell from the cli¤ down into the river.’

The trajectory followed by the figure is very detailed in these sentences. This information is not only given by path verbs like erori ‘fall’ and bota


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Number of ground elements per verb in Basque

Ground elements

Motion events (52)

One Source Goal More than one Two Three

32 (61%) 4 28 20 (39%) 18 2

‘throw’, but also the ground elements attached to the verb. Sentences (8) and (9) have two ground elements each, source (basauntzatik ‘from the deer’, handik ‘from there [deer]’) and goal (lurrera and its dialectal variant lurria ‘to the ground’), and sentence (10) has three, a source (amildegitikan ‘from the cli¤ ’) and two goals (behera ‘down, below’ and ibai batera ‘to a river’). Verbs with more than one ground element are not an exception in Basque, on the contrary, they seem to be perfectly fine and common as the figures in Table 3 attest. Of the 52 motion event descriptions with some ground elaboration in the falling scenes, 32 (61 percent) have one ground element and 20 (or 39 percent) have more than one. These figures not only suggest that Basque is a language where detailed ground descriptions are common but also that it is di¤erent from other V-languages such as Spanish. A special case of this pervasive tendency is what I call the ‘‘Complete Path’’ (CP) construction. This is a situation where both source and goal of the same motion event are linguistically expressed in the same sentence, even if one of them—usually the goal—is semantically redundant. An example of the Complete Path construction is the use of amildegitik behera (cli¤:abl down:all) in sentence (10). Here, the source is instantiated by a lexical item (amildegi ‘cli¤ ’) and the goal by a postposition (behera ‘downwards’). The important issue is that the semantic information that this postposition contributes—downward movement— is already encoded in the verb erori ‘fall’. What is more, it can be inferred by the other ground descriptions in this sentence and the world knowledge that we have about them, i.e., rivers usually are located underneath cli¤s and not the other way round. Nevertheless, the speaker in (10) inserts this ‘‘extra’’ and even ‘‘redundant’’ piece of information, and is not the only one in our sample to do so. This type of construction is found in all fifteen Frog Stories, usually describing a falling scene, and therefore with behera as a second element. However, downward motion scenes are not the only ones that may accept this type of construction, as illustrated in (11). In this example, the

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movement goes horizontally from the inside to the outside. This information is conveyed in both the postpostition kanpora ‘to outside’ and the verb irten ‘go out’. (11)

Eta kristalezko ontzitik kanpora irtetea and glass:inst:adn jar:abl out:all exit:ger:det lortu zuen. [B20h] obtain:pef aux ‘And (the frog) managed to get out of the jar.’

The fact that Basque speakers use this type of construction has important consequences for Slobin’s characterization of V-languages. As we will discuss in more detail in section 3.3, Slobin claims that, because of the sparser path possibilities open to them, speakers of V-languages tend to infer path trajectories, mostly but not necessarily from static descriptions of the setting (Slobin 1996a: 204). That is to say, the information about the trajectory that the figure follows is either explicitly mentioned in the text through a description of the setting where the action takes place— ‘‘There’s a river underneath the cli¤ ’’—or simply presupposed thanks to the context. Although we need to carry out more research on how the Complete Path construction works in Basque, so far it seems that the use of this construction contradicts the general trend in verb-framed languages. 3.2.3. Degree of event granularity Slobin’s analysis does not stop at the description of complex paths. As he argues, languages may di¤er in the way they structure and organize these ‘‘journeys’’. As we have just seen, Basque and English tend to mention more than one ground element per verb, whereas Spanish prefers none or just one. But di¤erences in ‘‘how’’ narrators say things do not necessarily mean that they do not narrate the same story. It is for this reason that we also need to look at the content of the narration, at what is narrated, and see whether speakers of these languages employ the same degree of event granularity, the same degree of detailed description of an event. In order to test this possibility, Slobin chooses the ‘‘deer scene’’ in the Frog Stories (see Appendix for the pictures from this scene). This is a very rich and complex scene that depicts how the boy and dog fall from the cli¤. It has six di¤erent narrative segments: i. ii. iii. iv.

Deer Deer Deer Deer

starts to run runs, carrying the boy stops at the cli¤ throws the boy (o¤ the antlers/down)


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v. Boy and dog fall vi. Boy and dog land in water Slobin (1996a: 204) finds that there are more segments mentioned in English descriptions of this scene than in the Spanish ones: All of the English adult narrators provide three or more segments, whereas only three-quarters of the Spanish ones do so. In other words, Spanish speakers do not ‘‘compensate’’ for the less elaborated ground descriptions through a higher degree of event granularity. In a later paper, Slobin argues that these di¤erences in event granularity are the result of the speakers’ ‘‘narrative habits’’. In his own words, speakers of S-languages are more likely to break up the event into a larger number of components, based on ‘‘narrative habits’’ of compacting several path components in a single clause. Speakers of V-languages, by contrast, have developed a narrative style that makes more sparing use of individual motion verbs to encode path components. (1997: 448)

Basque, as a V-language, should also show the same tendency towards less detailed event granularity. However, if we bear in mind that Basque presents a pervasive description and elaboration of ground, we expect this language to pattern not with V-languages but with S-languages. This is exactly what we find in the analysis of the deer scene. The results are summarized in Table 4. The figures in Table 4 add further support to this correlation between ground description and degree of event granularity. All but one of the Basque narrators (93 percent) mention three or more segments in this scene. There are even two cases where all six possible segments are provided by the narrator. Let us look at one of these cases in (12).19 (12)

Basauntza izutu egin zen, korrika hasi zen [1] deer:abs scare:perf emp aux running start:perf aux eta korrika jakina Aitor bere adarretan and running of.course Aitor:abs its antler:pl:loc

Table 4.

Event granularity in the ‘‘deer scene’’ in Basque

Number of segments

Fifteen Frog Stories

two three four five six

1 2 4 6 2

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I. Ibarretxe-Antunãno zeukala [2] Txurik ere hori ikusi zuenean has:comp Txuri:erg also that see:perf aux.when basauntzaren atzetik abiatu zen, jakina, deer:gen behind:abl go.towards:perf aux, of course, Txuri ba urduri eta ‘‘tsau tsau tsau tsau’’ Txuri:abs well nervous and ‘‘woof, woof, woof, woof ’’ eta ba urduri eta haserre hori ikusita basauntzak and well nervous and angry that see:part deer:erg bere, bere laguntxoa, Aitor zerama, ezta? his, his little.friend:abs, Aitor, carried, ok? Jakina, halako batean holako amildegi haundi Of course, that:adn one:loc that:adn cli¤ big batera iritsi ziren eta basauntzak amildegia one:all arrive:perf aux and deer:erg cli¤:abs ikusi zuenenean, ba frenatu egin zuen [3], see:perf aux.when, well stop:perf emp aux frenatu eta kolpe horrekin ba, zera, Aitor stop:perf and blow that:com well, what, Aitor:abs adarretatik askatu [4] eta handik erori egin zen antler:pl:abl free:perf and there:abl fall:perf emp aux eta bere parean zetorren, zera, Txuri ere ba and his side:loc came, what, Txuri:abs also well Aitorren atzetik erori [5]. Nora? Nora Aitor:gen behind:abl fall:perf Where:all? Where:all erori? Ba uretara [6]. [B20d] fall:perf? Well water:all ‘The deer got scared, he started to run [1] and it ran carrying Aitor [the boy] in its antlers [2]. When Txuri [the dog] saw it he went after the deer, of course, Txuri was nervous and [barked] ‘‘woof, woof, woof, woof ’’, and well, it was nervous and angry seeing that the deer carried its friend Aitor, okay? Suddenly they arrived at a big cli¤ and when the deer saw the cli¤, well, he stopped [3], he stopped and with the stop, well, Aitor got free from the antlers [4] and he fell from there and Txuri was next to him, he also fell after him [5]. Where? Where did they fell? Into the water [6].’

The passage in (12) is a very elaborated description of the deer scene. The narrator breaks up this scene into several components and describes segment by segment what takes place in this event. 3.3. Rhetorical style The last proposal deals with the rhetorical style that speakers of S- and Vlanguages employ in the narration of these events. As Slobin (1996a: 205)


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points out, despite the di¤erences in the degree of elaboration and description of the ground, narrators in these languages ‘‘tell the same story’’. Slobin argues that this can be explained on the basis of how much narrative attention speakers devote to movement and setting. He proposes that S-languages allocate more attention to the description of movement rather than to that of the physical setting in which the action takes place. This is due to the rich means that these languages have to describe path, to the ‘‘availability of verbs of motion (often conflated with manner) that can readily be associated with satellites and locative prepositional phrases to trace out detailed paths in relation to ground elements’’ (Slobin 1996a: 205). On the other hand, V-languages, constrained by their typological characteristics, take the opposite choice: they leave the path to be inferred and focus on the description of the setting. Let us look at examples (13) and (14). (13) (14)

The deer stops abruptly, which causes the boy to lose his balance and fall with the dog down into the stream. [S-96a] caen en la laguna [ . . . ] que estaba debajo de ese fall in the pond that was below of that precipicio. [A20a] cli¤ ‘They fall into the pond, which was below that cli¤.’

In the English example in (13), the location of the river below the place where the deer stops, i.e., the cli¤, is inferred by the trajectory described in fall . . . down into the stream. This becomes very evident if we compare (13) with the Spanish description of the same event in (14). Here, the speaker explicitly describes the position of the pond with respect to the cli¤ debajo de ese precipicio ‘under that cli¤ ’. But what happens in Basque? As a V-language, Basque should also focus on the physical description of the setting rather than on the dynamics of movement, but if we take into account that the description of path is more similar to S-languages, then we could expect it to behave like English. In fact, this is what we find in the data. Eighty percent of Basque speakers follow the S-language strategy, that is, the setting information—the location of the river below the cli¤—is inferred from the description of the trajectory adjoined to the verb of motion—from the cli¤ fall down into the river—as illustrated in (15). (15)

eta penãtik behiti hor doazte mutila ta and rock:abl below:all there go boy:abs and txakurra. [B20h] dog:abs ‘And there they go down from the rock the boy and the dog.’

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The only di¤erence to S-languages is perhaps that in Basque we also find examples with a combination of both static information about the physical setting and dynamic information about the trajectory, as in (16). (16)

eta gure Andoni eta txakurra amildegitik behera and our Andoni and dog:abs cli¤:abs below:all erori ziren, baina amildegiaren azpian erreka fall:perf aux but cli¤:poss below:loc river:abs zegoen zorionez eta ez zitzaien ezer was fortunately and neg aux nothing gertatu. [B20I] happen ‘And our Andoni [boy] and the dog fell down from the cli¤, but fortunately there was a river under the cli¤, and nothing happened to them.’

According to Slobin (1996a: 205), English adult narrators never take this option, they never provide a locative elaboration for this scene. By contrast, 25 percent of Spanish adult speakers do tend to use this strategy.20 In our data, three out of fifteen narratives have this static description. However, we need to point out that it does not occur on its own, as in the Spanish example (14). It comes after the complete path description, amildegitik behera ‘down from the cli¤ ’, which already presupposes where the river is located. 3.4.

Summary: Slobin’s proposals in Basque

In this section we have discussed how the three proposals suggested by Slobin fit with Basque data in oral adult narratives. In general, we could say that Basque does not behave as a typical V-language like Spanish in the elaboration and description of path. Basque fails to meet all of the predictions related to this motion component for V-languages. In fact, results suggest that Basque is more similar to English, that is, to an S-language, than to Spanish. Let us briefly summarize our findings for each proposal. With respect to the first proposal, Basque behaves as predicted for Vlanguages, that is, it has fewer, less expressive, and less frequent lexical items for descriptions of manner. The second proposal predicted that V-languages exhibited less frequent and less elaborate ground description than S-languages. Instead of complying with the results from V-languages, Basque goes the opposite way. Verbs do appear with plus-ground clauses; in fact, the percentages are even more dramatic than those found in English. Only 11 percent of verbs occur minus ground. The description of ground is not restricted to one piece of information either. The use of source and goal with the same


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verb is not rare as it is in Spanish, but is very common and natural, as the Complete Path construction attests. Further confirmation that Basque is very sensitive to path description comes from the analysis of event granularity in the deer scene. Ninety-three percent of Basque speakers mention more than three of the six segments that form this scene. This percentage is more similar to that found for English (100 percent) than to that for Spanish (75 percent). Finally, results from the third proposal—concerning rhetorical style in these narratives—once again situate Basque closer to English than to Spanish. According to this proposal, S-languages tend to focus more on the dynamics of movement than on a physical description of the setting, the technique followed by V-languages. All of the Basque narrators describe the path trajectory in varying degree of detail, whereas the physical setting is only mentioned occasionally and usually after the trajectory has already been established. This suggests that Basque speakers are more sensitive to the dynamics of movement than are Spanish speakers, at least in these narratives. However, the fact that some of them o¤er some static description for the same scenes makes us wonder whether this is just an exception to the rule or common practice. This is a very important question that needs further research because it might have important consequences for Slobin’s third proposal. If the static description is not just an exception, it would mean that Basque speakers focus their narrative attention not only on the dynamics of movement but also on the static description of the setting. Slobin o¤ers us a choice between one strategy or the other, but what the Basque data seem to indicate is that both strategies are permissible; one (dynamic) is preferred over the other (static), but both of them are used to some extent. 4. Discussion and conclusions: From individual language use to general typological di¤erence If we had to summarize our main findings in this article in just a few lines we could say something similar to the following: Basque is a verb-framed language within Talmy’s binary typological classification. This is so because in its characteristic expression of motion (i) the verb conflates the components of motion and path, and (ii) the component of manner is expressed in a separate element. As is typical for this type of language, Basque shows a relatively poor elaboration of manner; however, unlike V-languages, the component of path is described pervasively and in great detail. Since these findings are based on individual language usage, that is, on a relatively small number of oral narratives about a specific story

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by Basque individuals, one could cast some doubt not only on their scope but also on their validity with respect to motion and its typological characteristics in Basque. In other words, one could posit the following questions:21 i.

Are these findings constrained and biased by the type of data they are based upon? ii. Do these findings correspond to a general typological feature or just reflect individual language usage? iii. In case they are typological characteristics of the Basque language, are they shared by other languages and, what is more, do they a¤ect Talmy’s typology in any way? Before I start addressing these issues it has to be pointed out that more research is needed, covering not only Basque but other V-type languages in much more detail. However, what I present next seems to favor, and lend further support to, what has been reported in this article so far. This indicates that we are not just talking about what a collection of native speakers did with a children’s book on one occasion, but rather that this is what Basque speakers do and what the Basque language allows them to do when talking about motion events. Let us start with the first question. When researchers choose their materials and, in this case, their ‘‘data collection’’ tools, they are aware of the advantages and shortcomings that their choices may bring about. In the case of the Frog Stories—a wordless picture book applicable to any language and rich in locative trajectories—the main advantage lies in its convenience for obtaining contrastive data on motion events, but, as Slobin himself points out, one of its main disadvantages is the ‘‘online time pressure of speaking’’ (2000a: 115). This constraint disappears if we use written narratives such as novels, where writers have as much time as they need to be as expressive as they wish. In order to test this possibility, I collected data from four novels by contemporary Basque authors.22 Our analysis shows the same tendencies for the elaboration of manner and ground discussed in section 3. In the novels, for example, the total number of verbs is 44 and only a small proportion of them, 25 percent, can be classed as manner-of-motion verbs. With respect to the description of ground, we find that plus-ground clauses are the norm. Ninety-one percent of the motion verbs include further information about the source, medium, milestone, or goal. As was the case in the Frog Stories, the number of ground phrases per verb is not limited to just one piece of information, and we find numerous examples of verbs with two or three pieces of information, as illustrated in (17) and (18), respectively.

Motion lexicalization in Basque (17)

(18)

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Autobusetik salto egin eta pangetara korrika bus:abl jump make:perf and panga:pl:all running joan gara denok, egurrezko moilatik pangara go:perf aux:1pl all:pl:abs wooden pier:abl panga:all sartu eta ibaian behera goaz. enter:perf and river:loc below:all go:1pl ‘We jumped out of the bus and we all ran to the pangas, we went into the pangas from the wooden pier and we went down along the river.’ Gaztelutik behera itsasbazterrera jaitsi [zarete]. castle:abs below:all seashore:all descend:perf [aux:2pl] ‘You descended from the castle down to the seashore.’

The results obtained from the Basque novels indicate that our initial description of motion events, especially what we said about one of the particular characteristics of Basque—its elaboration of ground—is not just restricted to one type of data but characteristic of other modes of narrative. However, in order to be sure that these features can be considered typological characteristics of Basque, we need to discuss another possibility. It has been suggested that the detailed and pervasive elaboration of ground in Basque reported in this article could be due not to the type of language, i.e., Basque linguistic structure, but to the set of Basque speakers that we had as our informants and their personal elaborative style.23 Although this could certainly be a possibility, we argue against it on the basis of two pieces of evidence: the length and style of the narratives themselves on the one hand, and data from L2 Basque speakers on the other. If we look at the fifteen Frog Stories and compare their styles, we discover that they are all di¤erent to each other. Some narrators tell the story in the third person, others in the first person and yet others mix both possibilities. If we focus on the length of these stories they also vary a great deal. In order to do so, we take as a unit of analysis what Berman and Slobin (1994: 660) have called a ‘‘clause’’, i.e., ‘‘any unit that contains a unified predicate’’. By unified, these authors mean a predicate that expresses a single situation (activity, event, state) and includes both finite and nonfinite verbs, as well as predicate adjectives. We find that the average length is around 132 clauses, the longest narrative contains 318 clauses and the shortest 38. In spite of the disparity of these figures, which shows the di¤ering degrees of narrative elaboration that exists among Basque speakers themselves, all fifteen of the Frog Stories exhibit the characteristics of manner and path presented here. What is more, the av-

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erage number of clauses in Basque is also very similar to that for the Spanish Frog Stories, which is 97 clauses. We can therefore conclude that the characteristic elaboration of ground in Basque does not depend on the individual style of Basque narrators. But perhaps what really demonstrates that these characteristics are to be considered typological features is the analysis of narratives produced by L2 Basque speakers. According to Slobin’s theory, the particular lexicalization pattern of a given language largely determines the way in which native speakers express and describe motion in that language. As a consequence, native speakers, when acquiring their language, learn to pay attention to ‘‘particular aspects of experience and to relate them verbally in ways that are characteristic of that language’’ (Berman and Slobin 1994: 611). That is to say, native speakers are trained by their language to attend to particular details while talking about motion events. In previous studies on motion events in second-language acquisition (Cadierno 2004; Slobin 1996b), it has been suggested that, due to the training received while learning their native language, adult learners might find it di‰cult to restructure their native language lexicalization patterns into those of the new language they are acquiring. On the basis of these suggestions, what we would expect to find in these narratives is i. ii.

a similar elaboration of manner since both Basque and Spanish follow the pattern of V-languages an elaboration of ground more similar to that of Spanish than that of Basque. In other words, a predominance of minus-ground clauses, less pieces of ground information per verb, a lesser degree of event granularity, and a focus on description of the setting.

We ran the same Frog Story narration test with Spanish native speakers from the Basque Country who learned Basque as a second language. All of our subjects started the learning process as adults and came from a Spanish-speaking environment. When tested, they were all receiving formal teaching in preparation for the general Basque language examination (Euskararen Gaitasun Agiria—EGA). This examination corresponds to a C1 level/ALTE level 5.24 Table 5 summarizes our results. As we can see from Table 5, our expectations are fulfilled. Both L1 and L2 Basque speakers have a low percentage of manner verbs, 23 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Their main di¤erences, therefore, are found in the elaboration of ground. If we look at the percentages for the use of minus- and plus-ground phrases, we find that L2 Basque speakers use minus-ground phrases more often than L1 Basque speakers (31 versus 11 percent of the time). These figures show that, as predicted, their tendency is closer to that of Spanish speakers (with 37 percent). The elaboration


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A comparison of Slobin’s proposals for L1 and L2 Basque and Spanish speakers

Proposals 1. Verbs total manner 2a. Phrases minus-ground plus-ground 2b. Journeys complex path event granularity < 3 3. Rhetorical style setting path

L1 Basque

L2 Basque

Spanish

63 types 23%

20 types 20%

30 types 30%

11% 88%

31% 59%

37% 63%

several 93%

only one 25%

only one 75%

usually inferred described

usually inferred described

described inferred

of complex paths also reveals the same tendency. Whereas L1 Basque speakers describe several ground components, L2 Basque speakers follow the Spanish strategy and restrict the elaboration of ground to a single piece of information. What is more, the Complete Path Construction, which is so salient and pervasive in Basque, was not found for any of the L2 Basque speakers. In the falling scenes, these speakers tended to mention only the verb, as in (19), the source, as in (20), or the goal, (21), but never both source and goal, as is usually done by L1 Basque speakers. (19)

(20)

(21)

Eta bapatean txakurra [ . . . ] pisuagatik edo erori and suddenly dog:abs weight:cau or fell:perf egin zen [L2BS20b] emp aux:3s ‘And suddenly the dog fell because of the weight.’ eta bapatean barranko batetik bota zuen. [L2BS20c] and suddenly cli¤ one:abl throw:perf aux:3s ‘And suddenly [the deer] threw him over the cli¤.’ eta umea eta txakurra lurrera erortzen and boy:abs and dog:abs ground:all fell:hab dira. [L2BS20a] aux:3p ‘And boy and dog fell to the ground.’

On the basis of these results, we can argue that the characteristics that we have discussed in this article with respect to the elaboration of ground ought to be taken as typological features of the Basque language, and not as the individual elaborative style preferences of our Basque informants.

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Finally, the last question that we will briefly deal with concerns the implications of these typological characteristics for Talmy’s classification. Strictly speaking, the results that we have obtained in this analysis would not necessarily a¤ect the validity of Talmy’s binary typology. The latter is based on the way languages lexicalize the semantic components of a specific domain and not on how elaborately these components are detailed in narrative discourse. However, the fact that languages can vary so much within the same typological group is an issue that we cannot ignore for two main reasons. Firstly, it shows us the possible shortcomings of a broad typological classification such as Talmy’s in accommodating existing intra-typological variation. Secondly, it raises a fundamental question about the consequences of using a typological model to compare and contrast languages versus accounting for the multiple possible habitual ways in which speakers of those languages deal with specific semantic domains in discourse. As Slobin (2004) points out in one of his recent papers, a typology such as Talmy’s is useful in organizing the multiple factors and dimensions that characterize languages, but it cannot explain discourse structures on its own because there are several other morphosyntactic, psycholinguistic, and pragmatic factors that seem to play a decisive role in language. In Slobin’s own words, one particular use—the construction of oral narrative—requires typological descriptions that are sensitive to online processing. That is, habitual patterns of language use are shaped by ease of accessibility of linguistic forms—to producer and receiver, as well as by the dynamics of cultural and aesthetic values and the perspective and communicative aims of the speaker. (Slobin 2004: 257)

A clear case that demonstrates this need to blend typological descriptions and language use is that of the description of manner in motion events. In Talmy’s dichotomy, V-languages usually express manner in a separate element and S-languages in a satellite. Although this is generally what we find in the analysis of motion events in some of these languages, there are also cases in V-languages where manner conflates with the main verb. Verbs such as ibili ‘walk’, airatu ‘fly’, korrika egin ‘run’ are very common in Basque and other V-languages (cf. Spanish andar ‘walk’, volar ‘fly’, correr ‘run’ and saltar ‘jump’). Their usage is, however, restricted in some specific contexts: manner verbs are not licensed if the path expression predicates a boundary crossing (Aske 1989; Slobin and Hoiting 1994). This does not mean that this typological characteristic is not correct, but that we have to take into account other morphosyntactic and lexical factors.


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Nor should we forget that the expression of manner does not have to be restricted to one lexical item. Manner information can be expressed in several di¤erent words and constructions, or in the terminology of Sinha and Kuteva (1995), this information can be ‘‘distributed’’ over these elements. What is more, manner can be also conveyed by means of ¨ zyu¨rek and Kita 1999; nonlinguistic expressions such as gestures (see O ¨ McNeill 2000; Kita and Ozyu¨rek 2003). Finally, another factor that we should bear in mind is the appearance of manner description in the motion event itself. That is to say, why and when speakers of either type of language choose to mention manner. In general, we can say that V-speakers mention manner less frequently than S-speakers. In fact, studies in the translation of motion events across di¤erent language types (Slobin 1996a, b; in press) have shown that S-language translators tend to include manner information all the time, even in those cases where the original text does not contain it and that V-translators, on the other hand, usually omit manner description. But why is this so? Why do some speakers mention manner more readily than others? According to Slobin (2003, 2004), the answer is not that V-language speakers suppress attention to manner. This is not possible because manner information is of great importance to all human beings. What this author proposes instead is that it is only in those languages with a high codability in this domain that speakers are habitually bound to focus and describe manner. In other words, manner is more codable, i.e., accessible and easy to process, for some languages than for others. Consequently, instead of classifying languages into a binary typology, Slobin proposes a ‘‘cline of manner salience’’, where languages are classified alongside a continuum that ranges from ‘‘high-manner salience’’ to ‘‘low-manner salience’’. In recent years there has been an increasing number of papers analyzing motion events in various languages on the basis of Talmy’s and Slobin’s models (see Stro¨mqvist and Verhoeven 2004). Many of these studies have also pointed out that Talmy’s theory is unable to capture some of the particular lexicalization features found in languages such as Thai (Zlatev and Yangklang 2004), Ewe (Ameka and Essegbey, in press), Chinese (Slobin 2000a), or signed languages such as ASL and SLN (Slobin and Hoiting 1994). Some of these characteristics, especially the expression of the core component of motion with a verb and the description of the semantic components, have driven these authors to propose alternatives to Talmy’s two-way typology. Slobin and Hoiting (1994), for instance, suggest a further distinction between complex and simplex verbframed languages. A more radical approach is taken by Ameka and Essegbey and Zlatev and Yangklang who argue for the addition of a third

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lexicalization pattern that could account for serial verb languages such as Ewe and Thai. Following this line of research, Slobin (2004: 226) proposes a third type called ‘‘equipollently framed’’. This lexicalization category will include languages in which ‘‘both manner and path are expressed by ‘equipollent’ elements—that is, elements that are equal in formal linguistic terms, and appear to be equal in force or significance’’. This type does not only cover serial verb languages but also bipartite verb languages such as Algonquian, Athabaskan, Hokan, Klamath-Takelman, and generic verb languages like Jaminjung. It is not the aim of this article to evaluate any of these suggestions or propose new typologies; this is an interesting path that we would like to pursue in future research. All that we have sought to do here is draw attention to the limitations of packaging typologies and to the need for a more detailed and systematic study of intra-typological variation. The results that we have obtained from our analysis of Basque motion events have shown that Basque can be classified as a verb-framed language, but that this classification is not enough if we take into account the expression of this type of events in narrative discourse. Basque is very di¤erent from Spanish in the elaboration of the path component even though both are included in the same typological group. Future studies on the expression and lexicalization of motion will have to take these facts into account if they want to o¤er a full description of how motion events are expressed both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically. Received August 2001 Revision received 8 August 2003

University of Deusto—University of the Basque Country

Appendix 1: Classification of motion verbs in Basque Frog Stories Information

Verbs of motion in Basque Frog Stories

Neutral (intransitive) Direction (intransitive)

joan ‘go’, mugitu ‘move in’ abiatu ‘set o¤ ’, alde egin ‘leave’, atera ‘go out’, igo ‘go up’, irten ‘go out’, jarri ‘put in’, jo ‘set o¤, head’, montatu ‘mount’, pasatu ‘pass’, sartu ‘enter’ etorri ‘come’ aldendu ‘leave, move away’, hurbildu ‘approach’, inguratu ‘go around, get close’ bueltatu ‘return’, itzuli ‘return’

Direction þ deixis (intransitive) Direction þ relation in axis (intransitive) Direction þ limits of motion (intransitive) Direction þ extent of motion (intransitive)

ailegatu ‘arrive’, heldu ‘arrive to’, iritsi ‘arrive’

Motion lexicalization in Basque Information

Verbs of motion in Basque Frog Stories

Direction þ ground moving (intransitive) Ground þ direction (intransitive)

jarraitu ‘follow to’, segitu ‘follow’

Manner (intransitive)

Manner þ direction (intransitive) Motion Posture (intransitive) Limits of motion (intransitive) Direction (transitive) Direction þ ground moving (transitive) Deixis (transitive) Manner (transitive) Manner þ direction (transitive) Posture (transitive) Temporal/aspectual duration (transitive) Limits of motion

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ateatu ‘go out the door’, atzera egin ‘go backwards’, aurreratu ‘go forward’, eskumarantz egin ‘go towards the right’, gora egin ‘go up’, kanpora egin ‘go outside’, lurreratu ‘go down’, oheratu ‘go to bed’ airatu ‘fly’, ibili ‘walk’, irriste egin ‘slide, slid’, korrika egin ‘run’, makurtu ‘bend’, paseatu ‘stroll’, saltatu ‘jump’, salto egin ‘jump’ erori ‘fall’, eskapatu ‘flee’, ihes egin ‘escape’, jausi ‘fall’, jausi egin ‘fall’ agertu ‘appear, turn up’, azaldu ‘turn up, appear’, desagertu ‘disappear’ altxatu ‘raise, get up’, zutitu ‘stand up’ eten egin ‘stop’ atera ‘take out’, irten ‘take out’, pasatu ‘go beyond’, sartu ‘put inside’ segitu ‘follow’ erakarri ‘cause to bring’, eraman ‘carry’ astindu ‘shake’ bidali ‘send o¤ ’, bota ‘throw’, ihes egin ‘escape’ altxatu ‘raise’, ireki ‘open’, kendu ‘remove’ heldu ‘hold’ frenatu ‘brake, stop’, gelditu ‘stop’ (remain), hasi ‘start from’

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Appendix 2: The ‘deer scene’ in Frog Where Are You? (Mayer 1969)


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Notes *

1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

This research is supported by Grant BFI01.429.E from the Basque Country Government’s Department of Education, Universities, and Research. I would also like to acknowledge the support and help I received from the International Computer Science Institute and the Institute of Human Development at UC Berkeley, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Part of the research reported here was carried out while I was a research fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments, criticisms and suggestions: Juergen Bohnemeyer, Steve Levinson, Tim Pooley, Dan Slobin, the Language and Cognition Group at MPI, and the two anonymous reviewers for Cognitive Linguistics. Author’s e-mail address: [email protected]. A ‘‘satellite’’ is defined as ‘‘the grammatical category of any constituent other than a noun phrase or prepositional phrase complement that is in a sister relation to the verb root. [It] can be either a bound a‰x or a free word’’ (Talmy 2000a: 102). Motion events are situations ‘‘containing movement or the maintenance of a stationary location’’ (Talmy 1985: 85). The use of sound symbolic expressions for describing manner of motion seems to be a common practice in languages with sound symbolic systems (see Hamano 1998; Hinton et al. 1994; Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). Basque is among those languages and thus, there are several sound symbolic expressions (taka taka ‘small steps’, tirriki tarraka ‘dragging’) and words of sound symbolic origin (irristatu ‘slide’) in this area (Ibarretxe-Antunãno 2004). It is modified in that its main goal is not to prove the e¤ects of grammar on worldview or nonlinguistic behavior, but to show the way in which speakers of a language organize their thinking in accordance to the linguistic tools o¤ered by their native language. From this point on in the article we make use of Slobin’s abbreviations for satelliteframed languages (S-languages) and verb-framed languages (V-languages). In later papers (1996b, 1997, 2000a) Slobin has corroborated these di¤erences with data from other languages (S-languages: English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian; V-languages: French, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Turkish). In this article, we stick to English and Spanish for two reasons: (i) they are always taken as typical examples for this typological dichotomy, (ii) the amount of available data and discussion on this topic in these languages. Spanish is of special interest for us because of its contact situation with Basque. This refers to the L1 Basque data. The informants were speakers of the Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan and Low Navarrese dialects of Basque. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their help and collaboration in this project. The story starts when a frog escapes from its jar while both boy and dog are sound asleep. The following morning, when they discovered that the frog is gone, they start to search for it in the woods. This involves the description of di¤erent types of motion events such as falling, running, and climbing. The dog falls from a window. The boy climbs and falls from a tree. The dog runs away from a swarm of bees. The boy climbs a rock and gets entangled in the antlers of a deer. The deer throws both the boy and the dog over a cli¤ into a pond. Finally both of them get out of the water and climb over a log to find their missing frog. Every example from and reference to these data is indicated by a notation in square brackets. Data from published sources is labeled with the author’s initial and the year of publication, e.g., [S-96a] stands for Slobin 1996a, [B-S-94] for Berman and Slobin

346

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

I. Ibarretxe-Antunãno 1994. The sources of data from corpora are abbreviated with the language or dialect initial and subject, e.g., [B20a] stands for Basque adult subject a, [A] for Argentina, [C] for Chile, and [P] for Peninsular Spanish. I would like to thank Dan Slobin for giving me access to the Spanish data. These are also available from the Childes archive at hhttp://childes.psy.cmu.edu/pdf/5narrative.pdf i. It is important to distinguish between complex verbs with egin ‘make’ such those mentioned in (2c) and the use of the same verb egin as an emphatic verb as in leihotik behera erori egin da (window:abl below:all fall:perf emp aux) ‘He fell down from the window’. The latter is similar to the emphatic use of the verb do in English and is glossed as emp in this article. As Etxepare (2003: 385) points out, it is interesting to notice that some of these pairs of verbs are only synonyms if they are used as intransitive predicates. If we use them transitively, these are no longer synonyms, iritsi would mean ‘reach’, and heldu ‘grab’ (ailegatu does not accept the transitive construction). The synonymy between these verbs only involves the physical motion meaning of ‘go out’ and not other possible semantic extensions that each of these verbs may convey. Nine if we only count those with a di¤erent meaning (21%). The list of motion verbs in (2c) not only includes manner þ motion conflated verbs, but others with information about path, posture, deixis, and so on. A full classification of these verbs is found in Appendix 1. The information column is based on the unpublished coding system used at the University of California at Berkeley for motion events in narrative texts. It is interesting to notice that most of the non-manner verbs that Berkeley students produce are only mentioned once, the exceptions are go with five or more mentions and enter, move, and travel with two to four mentions. Obviously, this does not happen in the Basque case. None of the students omits typical path verbs like sartu ‘enter’, aterairten ‘exit’, but in contrast, there is one case where no manner verb is mentioned at all. The percentage of bare verbs in English adult narratives is 15 percent, while it is 63 percent in Spanish adult narratives. These figures are even more dramatic among children. English preschoolers o¤er 16 percent bare verbs versus 56 percent for their Spanish colleagues; English nine-year-olds produce 13 percent versus 54 percent among Spanish children of the same age. In the ‘‘Scene’’ column of Table 2, the total number of motion events per scene mentioned by all subjects is indicated in parentheses. An example of an elaborated complex path could be the following sentence: He went from the station [source], along the avenue [medium] and through the crowds [medium], past the monument [milestone], to his o‰ce [goal] (Slobin 1997: 439). Although Slobin does not mention this issue, I think it is important to point out the structure and order of these two ground elements. First of all, there is a pause ð ; Þ that breaks the description into two units, and secondly, the order of these elements is somehow ‘‘inverted’’: the goal of the motion is mentioned before the source of the motion. Despite the fact that there is only one verb in this sentence, I think the two elements do not form a conceptual unit as they do in the English example (or the Basque one discussed later in [10]), but remain two units, the second with an elliptical verb. Numbers in brackets indicate the relevant segment. As Slobin points out (1996a: 205), the di¤erence between English and Spanish in this respect is much bigger if we compare the development from ages five to nine years. In English there does not seem to be a major change, at both ages only eight percent provide some static description. The percentages in Spanish, on the other hand, are much more revealing, whereas only eight percent of the five-year-olds have some static description, 42 percent of the nine-year-olds take this option. Unfortunately, we do not


21. 22.

23. 24.

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have Basque children’s data at the moment to compare the development of these issues across ages, but this is certainly an area that deserves to be investigated in the future. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for bringing these issues to my attention. The four novels are Bernardo Atxaga’s Zeru Horiek (1996), Javier Cillero’s Norena da Virginia City? (1995), Ramon Saizarbitoria’s Ehun Metro (1991), and Joseba Sarrionandia’s Lagun Izoztua (2001). Here again, I follow Slobin’s (1996a) methodology for data collection. Twenty motion trajectories are selected at random from each novel (80 in total). For a more detailed analysis see Ibarretxe-Antunãno (2002). This possibility was raised by one of the anonymous reviewers. ALTE stands for the Association of Language Testers in Europe. This organization is made up of institutions within Europe that conduct examinations and certification of language learners. The ALTE exams are organized into six di¤erent levels (breakthrough, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Each level is described in terms of ‘‘can do’’-statements that refer to the student’s overall general ability, typical social and tourist abilities, work abilities, and study abilities. C1/level 5 students are expected to be proficient in the four fields. For more information on ALTE, see hhttp://www.alte.orgi.

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