Caused motion events in Modern Uyghur: a typological perspective

Abstract

Talmy’s motion event typology (Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Towards a cognitive semantics: Conceptual structuring systems, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has served as an influential framework for exploring event representation across languages. While confirming its basic premises, many studies argued that the typology cannot fully capture the vast intra- and inter-typological variations. Consequently, proposals have been made to expand the typology and/or reconceptualize it as a typology of constructional strategies for encoding events. This article furthers this line of inquiry by examining caused-motion expressions by adult speakers of an understudied Turkic language, Modern Uyghur. Systematic analyses of lexicalization patterns, that is, which components are typically selected for expression, how frequently they are selected, and how they are packaged in syntactic constructions, show that Uyghur is a prototypical verb-framed language. It differs most strikingly from English (considered satellite-framed) in terms of lexicalization patterns. Detailed comparisons with French and Turkish (putatively verb-framed) reveal intra-typological variations in that Uyghur speakers systematically used verb-framed constructions while French and Turkish speakers exhibit much flexibility and a general preference for satellite-framed constructions. Overall, our data lend support to Talmy’s typology conceived as a strategy-based typological framework.

Matched or moved? Asymmetry in high- and low-level visual processing of motion events

“…The other option was to choose motion events in which an agent displaces an object in a specific manner so that the object moves along a path, known as cause motion. We chose caused motion for this study to increase its relevance for, and connectivity, with a growing body of experimental work using this motion event type (Ji et al, 2011b; Ji & Hohenstein, 2014a, 2014b; Montero-Melis & Bylund, 2017; Tusun, 2023; Tusun & Hendriks, 2022; Wang & Wei, 2021). Another motivation was to partially replicate and enhance recent experimental work on the early stages of caused motion processing across Mandarin versus English speakers (Vanek & Fu, 2023), verifying the suitability of b-CFS as a method that can probe into the automatic processing of dynamic stimuli.…”

Uyghur–Chinese early successive adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion events

“…The seemingly superficial structural differences across languages outlined above have been found to have implications for habitual language use, particularly in terms of what aspects of motion events speakers typically profile and how often. Numerous crosslinguistic studies on motion expression have repeatedly demonstrated that S-language speakers show greater tendency to encode the framing event and the coevent simultaneously than their V-language counterparts, thereby rendering their motion descriptions semantically denser compared to those of the latter (e.g., Hendriks et al, 2021; Hickmann et al, 2009; Montero-Melis, 2021; Özçalışkan, 2015; Slobin, 2004; Tusun, 2022b; Tusun & Hendriks, 2019, 2022). The difference in semantic density has been attributed to different syntactic packaging constraints that S- versus V-languages impose on the speaker.…”

“…Interestingly, variability in syntactic packaging strategies in V-languages is not always observed. In a recent study, Tusun and Hendriks (2022) showed that speakers of Turkic languages are highly systematic in their syntactic packaging when expressing CM. They explained the lack of variability in Turkic in terms of word order effects.…”

“…Johanson, 1995), as in (5) and (6), but it can also be expressed (without the Manner dimension) via a causative marker suffixed to the verb, as in (7). Recent empirical studies on the typological status of Uyghur have shown that it is indeed a typical V-language (Tusun, 2022b; Tusun & Hendriks, 2019), and of relevance is Tusun and Hendriks’ (2022) finding that, when asked to verbalize CM events (e.g., ‘A man pushed a table into the cave’), Uyghur speakers consistently expressed Cause/Manner and Path jointly in verb-framed constructions. Regarding Chinese, (8) illustrates a CM event expressed in a ‘BA construction’ where the semantic components are expressed in a resultative verb compound (RVC): the first verbal element, i.e., V1, encodes Cause+Manner, and the second verbal element, i.e., V2, encodes Path. The typological status of Chinese has been a topic of much debate, primarily due to the challenge with ascertaining whether the V2 element in an RVC is a verb or a satellite.…”

“…This decision was based on typological work on Uyghur (cf. Tusun & Hendriks, 2022) arguing that, in Turkic motion constructions of this kind, the converbial clause and the main clause tend to have a single actancy where there is a strong semantic fusion, i.e., representation of one single event and a tendency toward lexicalization (cf. Johanson, 1995).…”