What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition

Abstract

Languages differ considerably in the attention that they pay to manner as a dimension of motion events. One factor that seems to influence attention to manner is a language’s lexicalization pattern. Following Talmy’s well-known dichotomy of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, the latter type provides more readily accessible constructions that include path and manner in compact form. In this chapter it is proposed that the dichotomy be expanded to included an “equipollent ” type, in which both path and manner receive equal weight. Furthermore, other factors also contribute to the degree of “manner salience ” of a particular language. In particular, language-specific morphosyntax, the availability of ideophones, and the availability of motion-related lexical categories (such as posture verbs) are three sorts of factors that interact with lexicalization patterns in influencing manner salience. It is proposed that linguistically-expressed manner salience can influence attention to details of experienced motion events as well as mental imagery formed on the basis of reception of motion event descriptions in speech or writing. For the past decade or so, I’ve been obsessed with linguistic descriptions of motion events and possible crosslinguistic differences in cognition (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hoiting & Slobin,

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