This study investigated whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predict how speakers of these languages perform in non-linguistic tasks. Using 36 motion events, we compared English and Spanish speakers' linguistic descriptions to their performance on two non-linguistic tasks: recognition memory and similarity judgments. We investigated the effect of language processing on non-linguistic performance by varying the nature of the encoding before testing for recognition and similarity. Participants encoded the events while describing them verbally or not. No effect of language was obtained in the recognition memory task after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding and in the similarity task after non-linguistic encoding. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to languagespecific patterns. Linguistic descriptions directed attention to certain aspects of the events later used to make a non-linguistic judgment. This suggests that linguistic and non-linguistic performance are dissociable, but language-specific regularities made available in the experimental context may mediate the speaker's performance in specific tasks.

The voluminous literature on linguistic relativity has concerned itself primarily with the search for influences of particular languages on nonlinguistic cognition in situations in which language is not being used, overtly or covertly. This represents a long tradition in which anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists have sought to relate grammatical and semantic systems of a language to the worldview or epistemology or culture of the community of speakers of the language. For example, Lucy has proposed a set of requirements for studies of linguistic relativity. He stipulates that such research “should assess the cognitive performance of individual speakers aside from explicitly verbal contexts and try to establish that any cognitive patterns that are detected also characterize everyday behavior outside of the assessment situation ” (Lucy, 1996, p. 48, emphasis added). In this view, “cognition ” is seen as a collection of concepts and procedures that come into play regardless of whether an individual is engaged in verbal behavior—speaking, listening, or verbal thinking. Such research is directed towards what Lucy calls “an independent cognitive interpretation of reality ” (Lucy, 2000, p. xii). A rather different approach to “cognition ” is provided by investigators who concern themselves with language use and cultural practice. For example, Gumperz and Levinson, introducing Rethinking linguistic relativity (1996, p. 8), underline the importance of “theories of use in context, ” including formal semantic theories (e.g., Discourse Representation Theory, Situation Semantics) and pragmatic theories (Relevance Theory, Gricean theories), along with research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In the present paper, I begin with the fact that human beings spend a large portion of their time in linguistic behavior of one sort or another—that is, we are creatures that are almost constantly involved in preparing, producing, and interpreting verbal messages. Accordingly, research on linguistic relativity is incomplete without attention to the cognitive processes that are brought to bear, online, in the course of using language.

Current cognitive linguistic research on the underlying conceptual organization of language has identified the “event ” to be a basic building block of language and cognition (e.g., Goldberg, 1998; Talmy, 2000). In this study, we focus on a particular type of motion event—namely, situations in which an animate being moves from one place to another.

Japanese has three purported goal-marking postpositions,-ni and-e on the one hand and-made on the other, where-ni/e only occur with “motion+path ” predicates while-made occurs with all motion predicates, including “motion+manner ” predicates. Previous analyses assumed that all of these postpositions are contributing goal semantics and that the distributional differences are due to additional semantics associated with-made, such as predicativity or path semantics. In this paper I show that the distributional differences are more complicated than just the occurrence with motion+manner predicates and that these distributional differences should instead be pinned down to something more fundamental, namely that-made is a generic event delimiter and-ni/e are argument markers. Finally, I generalize this analysis in light of non-motion uses of-ni/e and-made in a way that captures all of their uses while avoiding any motion-based polysemy and also points towards possible areas of exploration in the interaction of events and predicates.

is signifier and what is signified?

From a typological standpoint, motion events have perhaps received more attention than almost any other type of event. The reason, most likely, is the intriguing proposal of Leonard Talmy (1975, 1985, 1991, 2000) that languages fall into two types as to how they encode directed motion events. This pioneering research inspired a plethora of further studies of an increasingly more diverse

Perhaps the best studied example of lexical semantic typology is in the domain of motion verbs, where following Talmy’s seminal work (1975, 1985, 2000) there is an assumption that languages fall into two types according to how they lexicalize directed motion events. In so-called satellite-framed languages like English directed motion events are typically expressed via manner of motion verbs plus goal-marking adpositions (He ran to school), whereas in verb-framed languages like French directed motion may only be expressed via path verbs (Il est allé a l’école ‘He went to school’). This typology leads to an important but seldom addressed question: why should languages show such distinct ways of describing directed motion events? This question is all the more urgent once it is recognized that Talmy’s typology has led researchers to classify languages as either verb- or satellite-framed, although they don’t all fit comfortably into this dichotomy. Contra some recent suggestions that the salience of certain semantic pieces (e.g. PATH) is significant in understanding Talmy’s typology (cf. work by Slobin and his colleagues (1987, 1991, 1996, 1997, 2000)), we argue that the diversity among languages stems at least partly from differences in the morphosyntactic devices they make available for encoding the semantic ingredients common to all representations of motion events. Specifically, these differences have repercussions for the ways in which languages “combine ” these ingredients, giving rise to surface differences in the encoding of motion events; here we build on related proposals by Bouchard (1995), Pustejovsky and Busa (1995), Cummins (1996), Song and Levin (1998). Our account thus changes the locus of cross-linguistic diversity in this domain from underlying semantic representation to morphosyntax. Talmy’s typology is rather limited in scope: although it highlights two classes of languages in which directed motion events are encoded differently, a broader cross-linguistic survey reveals much greater typological variation. Many languages such as Japanese (a purported verb-framed language (Wienold,

Verb classes are sets of semantically-related verbs sharing a range of linguistic properties, such as: — possible realizations of arguments — interpretation associated with each possible argument realization The big question: What is behind verb classes that on the one hand makes them so appealing as a research tool and on the other hand explains their limitations? Overview: Part I: The appeal and limitations of verb classes

• Talmy (1975, 1985) suggests that languages lexicalize different notions in their verb roots. In the domain of motion events, languages fall into two major types: — PATH (OR V(ERB)-FRAMED) LANGUAGES: Lexicalize the path of motion in the verb; the manner, if specified, is expressed outside the verb (e.g., Romance languages).

Abstract not found