Dejan Stosic

Does the road go up the mountain? Fictive motion between linguistic conventions and cognitive motivations

Fictive motion (FM) characterizes the use of dynamic expressions to describe static scenes. This phenomenon is crucial in terms of cognitive motivations for language use; several explanations have been proposed to account for it, among which mental simulation (Talmy in Toward a cognitive semantics, vol 1. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000) and visual scanning (Matlock in Studies in linguistic motivation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp 221–248, 2004a). The aims of this paper were to test these competing explanations and identify language-specific constraints. To do this, we compared the linguistic strategies for expressing several types of static configurations in four languages, French, Italian, German and Serbian, with an experimental set-up (59 participants). The experiment yielded significant differences for motion-affordance versus no motion-affordance, for all four languages. Significant differences between languages included mean frequency of FM expressions. In order to refine the picture, and more specifically to disentangle the respective roles of language-specific conventions and language-independent (i.e. possibly cognitive) motivations, we completed our study with a corpus approach (besides the four initial languages, we added English and Polish). The corpus study showed low frequency of FM across languages, but a higher frequency and translation ratio for some FM types—among which those best accounted for by enactive perception. The importance of enactive perception could thus explain both the universality of FM and the fact that language-specific conventions appear mainly in very specific contexts—the ones furthest from enaction.

ParCoLab: A Parallel Corpus for Serbian, French and English

ParCoLab is a trilingual parallel corpus containing texts in Serbian, French and English. It is developed at the CLLE-ERSS research unit (UMR 5263 CNRS) at the University of Toulouse, France, in collaboration with the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Serbian being one of the less-resourced European languages, this is an important step towards the creation of freely accessible corpora and NLP tools for this language. Our main goal is to provide the scientific community with a high-quality resource that can be used in a wide range of applications, such as contrastive linguistic studies, NLP research, machine and computer assisted translation, translation studies, second language learning and teaching, and applied lexicography. The corpus currently contains 7.1M tokens mainly from literary works, but corpus extension and diversification efforts are ongoing. ParCoLab can be queried online and a part of it is available for download.

Within-type variation in Satellite-framed languages: The case of Serbian

Abstract After a wealth of studies on motion event descriptions, it seems hard to say something new: the Verb-framed/Satellite-framed typology proposed by Talmy has spawned a long debate. Among other things, previous work has shown within-type variation for one of the two language types defined by Talmy, namely Verb-framed languages. In this paper, we address this debate, showing within-type variation for the other type, Satellite-framed languages, with new data elicited from native speakers of Serbian. In order to do so, we compare it with five other languages, from three Indo-European language families (Romance, Germanic and Slavic). Our data show that Serbian is a particularly interesting case, since it is structurally Satellite-framed, but behaves like Verb-framed languages in that speakers do not always express manner and path jointly (i.e. manner in the verb and path in the satellite), as expected on the basis of Talmy’s typology. The main result of our paper is thus that there is a good deal of within-type variation for both language types identified by Talmy.