Consistency in Motion Event Encoding Across Languages

Abstract

Syntactic templates serve as schemas, allowing speakers to describe complex events in a systematic fashion. Motion events have long served as a prime example of how different languages favor different syntactic frames, in turn biasing their speakers toward different event conceptualizations. However, there is also variability in how motion events are syntactically framed within languages. Here, we measure the consistency in event encoding in two languages, Spanish and Swedish. We test a dominant account in the literature, namely that variability within a language can be explained by specific properties of the events. This event-properties account predicts that descriptions of one and the same event should be consistent within a language, even in languages where there is overall variability in the use of syntactic frames. Spanish and Swedish speakers (N = 84) described 32 caused motion events. While the most frequent syntactic framing in each language was as expected based on typology (Spanish: verb-framed, Swedish: satellite-framed, cf. Talmy, 2000), Swedish descriptions were substantially more consistent than Spanish descriptions. Swedish speakers almost invariably encoded all events with a single syntactic frame and systematically conveyed manner of motion. Spanish descriptions, in contrast, varied much more regarding syntactic framing and expression of manner. Crucially, variability in Spanish descriptions was not mainly a function of differences between events, as predicted by the event-properties account. Rather, Spanish variability in syntactic framing was driven by speaker biases. A similar picture arose for whether Spanish descriptions expressed manner information or not: Even after accounting for the effect of syntactic choice, a large portion of the variance in Spanish manner encoding remained attributable to differences among speakers. The results show that consistency in motion event encoding starkly differs across languages: Some languages (like Swedish) bias their speakers toward a particular linguistic event schema much more than others (like Spanish). Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the typology of event framing, theories on the relationship between language and thought, and speech planning. In addition, the tools employed here to quantify variability can be applied to other domains of language.

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

“…For example, Hickmann et al (2018) examined how French and English speakers expressed CM (e.g., ‘he pulled the box down the hill’) and found no difference in adult speakers’ semantic density. Similar observations have been made in comparisons between Spanish and Swedish speakers (Montero-Melis, 2021). However, these studies showed that it is also in encoding CM that speakers display more variability in their syntactic packaging strategies.…”

“…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.…”

Concerning variation in encoding spatial motion: Evidence from Finnish

“…Tversky's (1991) survey and route descriptions). In the literature on expressing motion, individual variation is under investigated (however, see Montero-Melis et al 2017, Montero-Melis 2021. As variation is known to be related to demographic factors as well as to areal differences in language use (Berthele 2013), an interesting question is also the amount of variation that occurs beyond such factorssuch as the individual preferences and choices in language use within a demographically rather homogeneous group of subjects.…”

“…The factors explored relate to individual differences as well as the semantics of the motion situation and the language-specific resources for encoding motion; they are also most likely to have effects in languages in general rather than just in Finnish as discussed in this article. On the other hand, the degree of within-language variation varies between languages, as Montero-Melis (2021) shows. In his study, the Spanish event descriptions show considerably more individual variation than the Swedish ones.…”

Speed as a dimension of manner in Estonian frog stories

“…Recently, more and more in-depth analyses have been conducted on the dimensions of motion descriptions that go beyond the general categories of path and manner (e.g. Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017, Matsumoto & Kawachi 2020, Stosic 2020, Kopecka & Vuillermet 2021, Łozińska 2021, Montero-Melis 2021, Tuuri 2021, which significantly broadens the scope of studies of motion language.…”