# On the directional encoding and conceptualization of perceptual events: The case of English and Russian

Yana Aquilina

► To cite this version:

Yana Aquilina. On the directional encoding and conceptualization of perceptual events: The case of English and Russian. 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Aug 2024, Helsinki, Finland. hal-04913965

HAL Id: hal-04913965

https://hal.science/hal-04913965v1

Submitted on 27 Jan 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
# On the directional encoding and conceptualization of perceptual events:
The case of English and Russian

Yana Aquilina

(University of Lyon 2; Dynamics of Language Lab)

Keywords: visual and auditory events, sensory path, manner of sound motion, verticality of a gaze, satellite-framed languages

Among studies on sensory language, there has been an increasing interest in spatial encoding of visual experiences. For instance, it has been observed that visual events are expressed via directional forms (1) in Indo-European (Cappelle, 2020), Uralic (Huumo, 2010), Tai–Kadai (Takahashi, 2000), Austroasiatic (Wnuk, 2022) and Mayan (Craig, 1993) languages.

(1) *Hunter looked into his eyes reassuringly.*

Meanwhile, motion encoding of auditory experiences as well as that of two or more senses in inter-modal comparative perspective remains understudied. Hence, the present paper investigates linguistic directional expression of both visual and auditory events. I will explore data from English and Russian, two languages previously reported to share similarities in the ways they convey motion (e.g. Slobin, 2005).

To explore the spatial framing of perceptual events, I adopt the notion of *sensory path* and assume that such events involve “two entities, the Experiencer and the Experienced, and [...] something intangible moving in a straight path between them in one direction or the other” (Talmy, 2000: 115). The paper aims at analyzing (i) distribution of directionality patterns (Experiencer → Experienced vs. Experienced → Experiencer) across the two sensory modalities and (ii) lexicalization patterns (in the sense of Talmy (2000)) of sensory path and manner in the two languages.

For this study, I built a parallel corpus of contemporary novels belonging to various literary genres (e.g. crime fiction, fantasy, science fiction). For each language there are two original texts as well as two translated texts (rendered from the other language). In contrast to most previous studies on sensory path, I didn't limit the working corpus to tokens with dedicated perception predicates (1), but extended my search to any constructions encoding Experiencer and/or Experienced ((2); (3)).

(2) *A soft rustling seemed to be coming from up ahead.*

(3) *The thin man threw Artyom an angry look.*

Regarding lexicalization patterns, the following inter-linguistic differences have been observed:
(i) Russian attests a verb with specialized semantics of sound motion (*donositsja* 'carry oneself towards'), while in English the motion of sounds is mostly expressed by a semantically more general deictic verb *come* (2). The extensive usage of *come* correlates with the fact that in English the manner of sound motion is frequently left unspecified. In Russian the availability of the goal-oriented prefix *do-* ('towards') allows expression of manner in the verb root (as in *zvuki doletali* 'sounds were flying towards [me]') which may explain why manner information is more salient across the Russian corpus; (ii) English frequently allocates attention to vertical visual path (as in *he looked up at the sky*), while Russian is less sensitive to it, possibly due to the relative complexity of a V+N construction available to express verticality of a gaze (as in *on podnjal glaza na nebo* 'he raised his eyes to the sky').

As for directionality patterns, in both languages visual events are predominantly conceptualized following the Experiencer → Experienced path ((1), (3)). On the other hand, auditory events mostly follow the Experienced → Experiencer pattern (2). I hypothesize that the fact that the Experiencer is represented either as source or as goal of motion may be explained by the different
physiological degree of control over the stimuli in vision and hearing. The visual experiencer can select
a stimulus by moving their eyes, whereas the auditory experiencer is less agentive in this regard, thus
being conceptualized as a ‘receptacle’ of sound.

References

Cappelle, B. (2020). Looking into visual motion expressions in Dutch, English, and French: How languages stick to well-trodden typological paths. In Y. Matsumoto & K. Kawachi (eds.), *Broader Perspectives on Motion Event Descriptions*, 235-280. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Craig C., 1993, Jakaltek directionals: their meaning and discourse function, *Languages of the World 2*, Lincom Europa, p. 23-36.

Huumo, T. (2010). Is perception a directional relationship? On directionality and its motivation in Finnish expressions of sensory perception. *Linguistics, 48*(1), 49-97.

Slobin, D. (2005). Relating narrative events in translation. In D. Ravid & H. Shyldkrot (eds.), *Perspectives on language and language development: Essays in honor of Ruth A. Berman*, 115-129. New York: Springer

Takahashi, K. (2000). *Expressions of emanation fictive motion in Thai*. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Expressions+of+emanation+fictive+motion+events+in+Thai&author=Takahashi+Kiyoko&publication+year=2000

Talmy, L. (2000). *Toward a cognitive semantics*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wnuk, E. (2022). Ways of looking: Lexicalizing visual paths in verbs. *Journal of Linguistics, 58*(1), 157-202.