Path and Manner Saliency in Polish in Contrast with Russian

Łozińska, Joanna

doi:10.1163/9789004360358

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…In Polish and Russian for instance, verbs for vertical spatial relations are more frequently coded in verbal descriptions than verbs for horizontal motion. This may stem from the perceptual difference between horizontal and vertical biological movements, the latter not being canonical among most animate entities, which may in turn affect linguistic structures ( Łozińska, 2018 , 2021 ). The strategies for expressing vertical relations also diverge from those used for horizontal relations, both in verb- and satellite-framed languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Up right, not right up: Primacy of verticality in both language and movement

Boulenger

Finos

Koun

et al. 2022

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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When describing motion along both the horizontal and vertical axes, languages from different families express the elements encoding verticality before those coding for horizontality (e.g., going up right instead of right up). In light of the motor grounding of language, the present study investigated whether the prevalence of verticality in Path expression also governs the trajectory of arm biological movements. Using a 3D virtual-reality setting, we tracked the kinematics of hand pointing movements in five spatial directions, two of which implied the vertical and horizontal vectors equally (i.e., up right +45° and bottom right −45°). Movement onset could be prompted by visual or auditory verbal cues, the latter being canonical in French (“en haut à droite”/up right) or not (“à droite en haut”/right up). In two experiments, analyses of the index finger kinematics revealed a significant effect of gravity, with earlier acceleration, velocity, and deceleration peaks for upward (+45°) than downward (−45°) movements, irrespective of the instructions. Remarkably, confirming the linguistic observations, we found that vertical kinematic parameters occurred earlier than horizontal ones for upward movements, both for visual and congruent verbal cues. Non-canonical verbal instructions significantly affected this temporal dynamic: for upward movements, the horizontal and vertical components temporally aligned, while they reversed for downward movements where the kinematics of the vertical axis was delayed with respect to that of the horizontal one. This temporal dynamic is so deeply anchored that non-canonical verbal instructions allowed for horizontality to precede verticality only for movements that do not fight against gravity. Altogether, our findings provide new insights into the embodiment of language by revealing that linguistic path may reflect the organization of biological movements, giving priority to the vertical axis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Up right, not right up: Primacy of verticality in both language and movement

Boulenger

Finos

Koun

et al. 2022

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…In existing research on Slavic, the deictic content has been discussed in relation to the prefixes przy-/pri-and po-and to wy-/vy-and w-/v-in Polish and Russian (Łozińska 2018, Apresjan 1986, Grenoble 1998, Lewandowski 2014, von Waldenfels 2016. Lozińska (2018) claims that deictic motion away from or towards the speaker is typically coded by the Polish po-and przy-(although w-and wy-also have deictic senses); przy-and pri-in Polish are primarily used to code the deictic relation of approaching the speaker or another DC, such as the place where the conceptualizer's attention is focused.…”

Section: Deictic Meaning Of Motion Verbs Deictic Prefixesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Deictic verbs are verbs whose interpretation is dependent on the location of speech-act participants (Fillmore 1997), such as come and go. In research on Slavic, certain motion verbs' prefixes have been discussed as "deictic prefixes" (see Grenoble 1991, Filipović 2009, Łozińska 2018. Particular emphasis in this analysis is on the prefixed motion verbs dojda/doći, idvam/dolaziti, otida/otići, and otivam/odlaziti found in Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian literary texts and their translations.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Translating deictic motion verbs among Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian: A corpus-based study

Nedelcheva

Šarić

2021

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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This article deals with translating South Slavic deictic verbs. Specifically, we consider translations among Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian. Deictic verbs are verbs whose interpretation is dependent on the location of speech-act participants (Fillmore 1997), such as come and go. In research on Slavic, certain motion verbs prefixes have been discussed as deictic prefixes (see Grenoble 1991, Filipović 2009, Łozińska 2018). Particular emphasis in this analysis is on the prefixed motion verbs dojda/doći, idvam/dolaziti, otida/otići, and otivam/odlaziti found in Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian literary texts and their translations. We present a brief quantitative overview and conduct a qualitative study of deixis-related meanings, paying necessary attention to other non-deictic meanings. Special attention is given to the constructional interplay of various deictic elements that co-occur with deictic verbs. Since we deal with literary texts and not everyday interaction, we consider the genre and context and apply the notion of viewpoint, which also covers the mental viewpoint adopted by the narrator, in addition to the deictic viewpoint of one of the speech participants. In the study, we observed shifts in point-of-view from deictic to non-deictic construal and vice versa, and from dynamic to static construal. These phenomena relate to the fact that in a text with a third person narrator, there is no innate deictic centre, while in casual conversation, the interlocutors create the deictic centre. The results show a preference for using come when motion towards a protagonist is described in a neutral context.

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“…Since the verb typically conveys Manner of motion, satellites and prepositional phrases play an important role in the representation of motion events in Polish, making a distinction between Source-, Medial-, and Goal-oriented events (cf. Kopecka 2010Kopecka , 2012Lewandowski 2014;Łozińska 2018). Note, however, that our dataset also reveals the use of verbs such as oddalić się 'to move.away REFL' and zbliżyć się 'to approach, move toward (lit.…”

Section: Morphosyntactic Resources Used In Polishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Source/Goal (a)symmetry

Fagard

Kopecka

2020

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This paper compares the expression of Source and Goal in German and Polish, on the basis of descriptions elicited with a series of video clips. As satellite-framed languages (Talmy 1985, 2000), both German and Polish mainly rely on grammatical morphemes to encode Path of motion with respect to Source and Goal. Nevertheless, despite this shared typological feature, these languages also display fine morphosyntactic and semantic differences. Our study reveals that the expression of Source and Goal is more asymmetrical in German as compared to Polish, in both the types of linguistic resources and the semantic distinctions. We show that German speakers tend to combine Path satellites with Path verbs – including both deictic satellites and deictic verbs – more frequently in Source-oriented events, depicting them with finer semantic distinctions than Goal-oriented events. In the expression of the Ground, however, they tend to make more distinctions in the expression of Goals as compared to Sources, by using a greater variety of prepositions. Polish speakers, by contrast, tend to express Source and Goal in a more symmetrical fashion. These cross-linguistic differences are discussed in the light of language-specific characteristics and their role in the expression – symmetrical or asymmetrical – of Source and Goal.

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Path and Manner Saliency in Polish in Contrast with Russian

Cited by 9 publications

References 59 publications

Up right, not right up: Primacy of verticality in both language and movement

Up right, not right up: Primacy of verticality in both language and movement

Translating deictic motion verbs among Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian: A corpus-based study

Source/Goal (a)symmetry

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