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

SUBMITTER: Montero-Melis G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8042225 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature