scholarly journals MOTION VERBS IN PERSIAN AND ENGLISH: A FRAMENET-BASED CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Author(s):  
Zolfa Imani ◽  
Rezvan Motavalian Naeini

The current research aims at exploring and comparing the semantic frames of motion verbs in English and Persian. In pursuit of this goal, the novel Animal farm by G. Orwell (1945) was selected and compared with its Persian translation, Qale heyvanat (Atefi, 2010). The sentences including motion verbs were primarily extracted from the novel and then a comparison was made between each English sentence and its Persian counterpart. Afterwards, the semantic frames of the English and Persian motion verbs were obtained from the FrameNet database. It should be noted that when the motion verbs in English had an equivalent which could be interpreted in a different way in Persian, the Persian verb was searched for in one of the most reliable Persian to English dictionaries—Persian to English Dictionary (Aryanpur and Aryanpur, 2007). We searched for its English equivalent and then the newly obtained English verb was searched in FrameNet for the semantic frame. When comparing the semantic frames of the motion verbs in the two languages examined, we concluded that motion events in English and Persian were expressed through miscellaneous motion verbs each of which involves a semantic frame peculiar to it. Likewise, the frames may be similar or different cross-linguistically in case of semantic differences, or they might be pragmatically similar.

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Ikbal Zeddari

<p>This paper provides a contrastive analysis of locative and directional motion events in English and Arabic. Within a micro‑parametric approach to crosslinguistic variation, it argues that both languages encode the distinction between manner and direction in their inventory of motion verbs. In the prepositional domain, purely locative and directional prepositions are shown to exist in the two languages; they respectively derive locative and directional interpretations with manner of motion verbs. The class of ambiguous prepositions, which gives rise to both locative and directional interpretations, is shown to be distinctive of English. Implications of this contrastive analysis to the bidirectional acquisition of English and Arabic locative and directional motion constructions are discussed.</p>


1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 363-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letitia R. Naigles ◽  
Paula Terrazas

English and Spanish speakers differ in the ways they talk about motion events, but how have these different modes of expression become instantiated as differing generalizations—as syntactic rules, lexical patterns, or both? In two studies, we asked English- and Spanish-speaking adults to interpret novel motion verbs presented in three types of sentence frames. Overall, English speakers expected novel verbs to encode the manner of motion, whereas Spanish speakers expected the verbs to encode the path of motion. The sentence frames also significantly affected how the speakers interpreted the novel verbs. We conclude that speakers of different languages represent their different generalizations about the composition of motion verbs both lexically and syntactically, and discuss how these generalizations might be important for issues of language acquisition and linguistic relativity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg ◽  
Utei Charaleghy Pamphila

This paper investigates the quantitative distribution (type and token frequencies, and type-per-token ratio [TTR]) of motion verbs found in English and Indonesian versions of the novel Twilight (Meyer, 2005; Sari, 2008). The study is contextualized within two divergent views on the typological characteristics of Indonesian lexicalization patterns of motion events. One study (Son, 2009) suggests that Indonesian behaves like English, representing a satellite-framed pattern (i.e., lexicalizing Manner of motion in the main verb) while another study (Wienold, 1995) argues for the verb-framed nature of Indonesian (i.e., lexicalizing Path of motion in the main verb). We seek to offer a quantitative perspective to these two proposals. Our study shows that, compared to English, Indonesian has significantly higher number (i.e., types) and occurrences (i.e., tokens) of Path verbs (reflecting the verb-framed pattern). Moreover, the higher TTR value of Path verbs for Indonesian shows a greater lexical diversity in the inventory of Indonesian Path verbs compared to English. In contrast, the English Manner verbs are significantly higher in number and in token frequency than Indonesian (suggesting the satellite-framed pattern), and show greater lexical diversity given the higher TTR value. While these findings lean toward supporting the verb-framed pattern of Indonesian (Wienold, 1995), we caution with the limitation of our conclusion and offer suggestions for future study.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-611
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Rottet

Abstract The English verb-particle construction or phrasal verb (pv) has undergone dramatic semantic extensions from the expression of literal motion events (the ball rolled down the hill) – a pattern known as satellite-framing – to idiomatic figurative uses (the company will roll out a new plan) where selection of the particle is motivated by Conceptual Metaphors. Over the course of its long contact with English, Welsh – also satellite-framed with literal motion events – has extended the use of its verb-particle construction to replicate even highly idiomatic English pv s. Through a case study of ten metaphorical uses of up and its Welsh equivalent, we argue that this dramatic contact outcome points to the convergence by bilingual speakers on a single set of Conceptual Metaphors motivating the pv combinations. A residual Celtic possessive construction (lit. she rose on her sitting ‘she sat up’) competes with English-like pv s to express change of bodily posture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 7887-7894
Author(s):  
Victor Petrén Bach Hansen ◽  
Anders Søgaard
Keyword(s):  

In conversation, we often ask one-word questions such as ‘Why?’ or ‘Who?’. Such questions are typically easy for humans to answer, but can be hard for computers, because their resolution requires retrieving both the right semantic frames and the right arguments from context. This paper introduces the novel ellipsis resolution task of resolving such one-word questions, referred to as sluices in linguistics. We present a crowd-sourced dataset containing annotations of sluices from over 4,000 dialogues collected from conversational QA datasets, as well as a series of strong baseline architectures.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano

AbstractThe concept of motion is present in all the world’s languages. However, the ways in which speakers of different languages codify motion do not seem to be so universal. Languages offer different types of structures to express motion, and speakers pay attention to different elements within the motion event. The goal of this paper is to examine in great detail how motion events are described and expressed in Basque oral and written narratives. This study focuses on three main areas: motion verbs, elaboration of Manner and elaboration of Path. Although Basque can be classified in Talmy’s terms as a verb-framed language, it is argued that it is not a prototypical example of this group with respect to the lexicalisation of Path. Unlike other verb-framed languages, the description of Path in Basque motion events is very frequent and detailed, not only in situations when it adds new information, but also in pleonastic cases. This characteristic seems to be related to Basque’s rich lexical resources for motion and space, as well as to its high tolerance for verb omission. On the basis of these data, the scope of Talmy’s binary typology is questioned. It is suggested that the verb- and satellite-framed language typology should be revised in order to account for these intra-typological differences.


2010 ◽  
pp. 1825-1843
Author(s):  
Gwo-Jen Hwang ◽  
Hsiang Cheng ◽  
Carol H.C. Chu ◽  
Judy C.R. Tseng ◽  
Gwo-Haur Hwang

In the past decades, English learning has received lots of attention all over the world, especially for those who are not native English speakers. Various English learning and testing systems have been developed on the Internet. Nevertheless, most existing English testing systems represent the learning status of a student by assigning that student with a score or grade. This approach makes the student aware of his/her learning status through the score or grade, but the student might be unable to improve his/her learning status without further guidance. In this paper, an intelligent English tense learning and diagnosticsystem is proposed, which is able to identify studentlearning problems on English verb tenses and to provide personalized learning suggestions in accordance with eachstudent’s learning portfolio. Experimental results on hundreds of college students have depicted the superiority of the novel approach.


Author(s):  
Yo Matsumoto

Japanese is a language rich in verbs representing Path of motion, but it also has verbs representing Manner and Deixis. Examining how they are used can deepen our understanding of some of the interesting properties of the Japanese language. In typological literature on motion events descriptions, Japanese has been claimed to be the type of language in which Path is expressed in the main verb position rather than elsewhere in the sentence, with the use of a path verb. However, this view must be qualified in two ways. First, the language exhibits intralinguistic variation, using postpositions and other nonverbal elements to represent Path notions such as FROM, TO, and ALONG. Second, Path is expressed in the main verb position only when Deixis is absent from the sentence. One feature of manner verbs in Japanese is that they are not used very often, especially concerning walking events. This phenomenon is accounted for by the “cost” of expressing Manner in Japanese. Another property of manner verbs in Japanese is they are incompatible with a goal phrase, which has been previously accounted for in different ways. A close semantic examination of manner verbs suggests that this restriction can be attributed to the nature of goal marking, rather than the semantics of manner verbs. An examination of corpus and experimental data also reveals how Japanese speakers use deictic verbs. Deictic motion verbs are used very frequently, though this tendency is not observed in descriptions of the motion of inanimate entities. Finally, deictic verbs in Japanese are sensitive to the notion of the speaker’s interactional space or territory, not just restricted by the spatial location of the speaker.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1266
Author(s):  
Naghmeh Ghasdian ◽  
Ahmad Sedighi

According to books of grammar, a causative form is an expression of an agent causing or forcing a person to perform an action. Translation of English causatives into Persian seems to be one of the biggest problems that Translation students and novice translators usually come across. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the translation strategies applied by the professional translator and translation trainees while translating English causatives into Persian. In this descriptive corpus-based study, the present researcher examined sixty causative constructions of novel Lord of The Flies by Gerald (1991) and their Persian translation by Mansouri (2003). In addition, twenty causative constructions from the novel were given to the twenty Translation students in order to analyze their Persian translations of causative constructions. Based on the finding, the professional translator has used Non-causative and Positive Implication strategies most frequently, whereas the students have used Auxiliary and Noncausative strategies most frequently. It can be concluded that there is a strategy behind every choice, and a reason behind every strategy, and translators should try their best to transfer all the components of a causative verb as well as possible, because each word or verb has its own value. The translator's mastery over the causative construction in the language pair explores throughout this study reminds us of a point of paramount significance. The main implication of this research may make the translators, at any level, better understand the English causative sentences and avoid producing translations that hinder communication between the translator and the readers.


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