Manipulating Manner: Semantic Representations of Human Locomotion Verbs in English and German

Manipulating Manner: Semantic Representations of Human Locomotion Verbs in English and German Katherine S. Phelps (Katherine.Phelps@Colorado.Edu) Department of Linguistics, Hellems 290, 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309 USA Steve Duman (Steven.Duman@Colorado.Edu) Department of Linguistics, Hellems 290, 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309 USA Abstract The research we report here manipulates cadence independently from other gait features and shows that it is the latter that influence the category boundary between ‘walking’ and ‘running’ terms, but cadence influences naming on either side of the boundary. Second, it incorporates naming patterns from a German dialect that suggest Malt et al.’s (2008) claim may be too strong. Though some German verbs of human locomotion do encode the biomechanical distinction between ‘walking’ and ‘running’, the term ‘laufen’ (often translated as both walk and run) does not. This runs contrary to prior predictions. Moreover, the extent to which cadence influences naming may be language-dependent, as some German verbs appear to be less sensitive to manipulations of cadence than their English counterparts. The present study therefore contributes to research of event categorization in two ways. First, it adds to our understanding of the semantic representations underlying motion verbs by providing a concise picture of the gait features speakers attend to when naming human locomotion. Second, it compares naming patterns of human locomotion in English and German, revealing unexpected patterns not present in previous cross-linguistic comparisons. It has been argued that real-world structure constrains the semantic representations of verbs, resulting in cross-linguistic convergence of naming patterns for motion events. This study explores the nature of this real-world structure by manipulating individual features of human locomotion in video stimuli and comparing the responses of English and German speakers in an elicitation task. We show that individual features influence naming patterns and that languages encode these features differently. Furthermore, the semantic representations of several German motion verbs sharply contrast with their English equivalents. Keywords: semantic representations; naming; concepts; cross- linguistic diversity; motion verbs; locomotion Introduction Languages divide the world in different ways. Moreover, the boundaries between semantic categories within a particular language are not necessarily fixed. These two factors contribute to a complicated picture in any cross- linguistic comparison of naming patterns. Still, such research has yielded strong evidence of convergent naming patterns across languages in domains such as color (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Kay et al., 1997), emotion (Eckman, 1972), body terms (Majid, Enfield & van Staden, 2006) and events (Majid, Boster, & Bowerman, 2008; Malt et al., 2008). While cognitive biases shared by humans may result in similar construals, humans are also sensitive to salient discontinuities in the world. This real-world structure constrains naming patterns. Malt et al. (2008) show that structure in the world has a strong influence on the naming patterns of motion events. In a cross-linguistic study in which participants were asked to describe human locomotion, the researchers demonstrate that Dutch, English, Japanese and Spanish speakers uniformly mark a biomechanical distinction between ‘walking’ and ‘running’ gaits when naming these events. However, gait is a cluster of co-occurring features and Malt et al.’s (2008) data do not indicate which of these features are encoded by motion verbs. Also, their study is limited to four languages and should be augmented with data from more languages. Naming Human Locomotion Events Continuous human locomotion is particularly interesting due to its biomechanical complexity; it is composed of many co-occurring features. These biomechanical features include but are not limited to stride length, knee bend, elbow bend, and cadence, i.e., the number of steps per unit of time (Kiss, Kocis & Knoll, 2004). Combined, these features can be described as a person’s gait, or their manner of motion. A speaker may draw on several of these gait features when naming a human locomotion event. Importantly, at a particular speed there is a dramatic switch between the clusters of features often categorized as a ‘walking’ gait—a pendulum-type body motion where at least one foot stays on the ground at all times—and a ‘running’ gait—characterized by more elastic, springing movement (Alexander, 1992). Malt et al. (2008) demonstrate how this real-world structure—namely the dramatic shift in gait—informs the