In press: In: Dimitrova-Vulchanova, M - NTNU

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Particularly interesting with respect to the encoding of these features are what we here label ‘verbs of biological motion’. The term ‘biological motion’ denotes the patterns of body and limb motion which animate creatures employ to achieve translational motion. Biological motion differs from non-biological motion in several ways (however, see Bejan & Marden 2006 for a unified perspective on all motion). Its recognition and expression in language is of paramount cognitive and social importance to human beings (Mandler 1996, Troje 2002). It is by definition self-agentive and involves the cyclic iteration of events of greater complexity (the cycles/patterns of internal motion of the body and limbs), the function of which is to cause translational motion (Dimitrova-Vulchanova 1996/99). A viable hypothesis of the factors that play a role in biological motion categorization can draw on evidence from research in visual perception. As it turns out, the human mechanisms of biological motion recognition are extremely robust. Biological motion can be recognized from strongly impoverished stimuli, for example when the moving figure is reduced to a point-light display (classical experiment in Johansson 1973, Giese 2004a, b). Furthermore, motion categorization is learning-based, perspective-dependent and selective (ibid). Giese & Poggio (2003) argue that the robustness of motion categorization resides in two neural pathways, each of them representing motion in a specific way: A form-pathway recognizes biological motion as a sequence of ‘snapshots’ of the figure in motion, and a motion-pathway recognizes biological motion as a sequence of optic flow patterns. While human action perception seems to tolerate substantial variation in form features (Giese 2004 a, b), motion patterns seem to be specific to particular types of actions, which explains why biological motion can be recognized only through the motion pathway and in the absence of form information (e.g. in point-light displays). This theory of motion recognition enables us to hypothesize which criteria will be relevant in the categorization and linguistic encoding of biological motion. Criteria related to the form-pathway of recognition are body shape and proportions (e.g. bulky vs. slim body, short vs. long legs), characteristic use of limbs (e.g. biped vs. quadruped; the isolated movements of the limbs) and, by extension, also species e.g. human vs. non-human). The series of ‘snapshots’ in a particular temporal order is what we will call the cycle of a particular type of biological motion. Relevant factors, related to the motion pathway of recognition will be characteristic speed, path (the presence vs. absence of translational motion), basic path shape (underspecified vs. globally specified, cf. Nikanne & van der Zee 2005, Dimitrova-Vulchanova 2004a, b). The view dependence of motion recognition will predict that factors like figure orientation (e.g. front forwards vs. front backwards, head up vs. head down), relative vector orientation (towards vs. away from vs. 4
left-to-right vs. right-to-left) will play a part also in categorization, and possibly in lexicalization (cf. Jellema et al. 2002 for a bias for left-to-right human walking recognition in the macaque, also Dimitrova-Vulchanova & van der Zee, in preparation). 2. Objectives From the brief discussion above, it has become clear that Manner and Path are pre-theoretical terms, useful in the description of major lexicalization strategies (e.g. the path / manner contrast). Detailed typological and conceptual structure research, however, ought to resort to a more refined system taking into account the different parameters that define these notions. With this in mind, we conducted an exploratory study which had three main goals. The first goal was to zoom in into the features comprising “manner” and to empirically test the validity of the parameters proposed in van der Zee (2000), Nikanne (2004), Nikanne & van der Zee (2005) and Dimitrova-Vulchanova (2004a, b), and to check whether there is variation in naming preferences when the scenes vary on different parameters. Our second objective was to find whether there is evidence of the presence of a translational component (the feature [+Path]) in the conceptual structure of common manner verbs, such as run, walk, crawl and climb (cf. Berman & Slobin 1994, Jackendoff 2002b, Dimitrova-Vulchanova 2003, 2004a, b). The third objective was to check whether in the description of motion scenes native speakers of the target languages would resort to motion verbs we define as basic-level in these languages (e.g., walk, run, crawl, climb) or to the super-ordinate general motion verbs (e.g., go, come, move), or would perhaps use more concrete and detailed manner verbs (e.g., gallop, scurry, jog, lope and the like). 3. The Verbs All three languages in the current study (English, Norwegian and Bulgarian) fall in Talmy’s satellite-framed category. Typically, they conflate translational motion with manner and express the path in such contexts through satellites or prepositional phrases, as shown in the examples in (1a-c). However, all three languages also have a dedicated category of verbs encoding pure translational (non-conflated) motion. Within the latter category, two major types can be distinguished. On the one hand, we have verbs that denote bounded motion (e.g. the boundary-crossing constraint of verb-framed languages), as in (1d) parallel to the Spanish example in (1e), and, on the other, verbs that do not encode any path specification (i.e. they lexicalize ‘pure translational motion’), as in English move, Norwegian bevege seg and Bulgarian dviza se (both meaning ‘move’) in the examples in (1f-h). 5
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Page 3: such as figure orientation). Common
Page 7 and 8: With respect to terrestrial biologi
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Page 11 and 12: 3.3 Verbs of walking The most centr
Page 13 and 14: 3.6 Features in the representation
Page 15 and 16: change of location, and whether the
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Page 19 and 20: Fig. 2 Overall frequencies of the t
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Page 23 and 24: verbs only in Norwegian. In Bulgari
Page 25 and 26: Tversky 1977), and are specifically
Page 27 and 28: and respectively the verbs naming t
Page 29 and 30: across species at particular Froude
Page 31 and 32: independently, there is sufficient
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Page 35 and 36: motion scenes that we had selected
Page 37 and 38: Dimitrova-Vulchanova, M. 1999. Incr
Page 39 and 40: Papafragou, A. et al. 2002. Shake,
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Page 43 and 44: 13 Long-legged bird walking 14 Croc
Page 45 and 46: 25 Snake crawling 26 Snake sidewind
Page 47 and 48: Fig. 1b. Multiset tree for Bulgaria
Page 49 and 50: Fig. 2b. Multiset tree for English
Page 51 and 52: Fig. 3b. Multiset tree for Norwegia

In press: In: Dimitrova-Vulchanova, M - NTNU

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