engleski

The encoding of Motion elements in Croatian

The thesis reports on the most common strategies native speakers of Croatian use for encoding Motion and Path in their descriptions of motion events. The first analysis entails the following elements: the speakers' lexicalization of Motion and Manner in two situation types, boundary-crossing and boundary-reaching/non-boundary crossing, respectively ; the frequencies of the verb types used ; and the extent to which they segment the Path across the abovementioned situation types. The second analysis examines the speakers' expressions of the two defining points of Path (Sources and Goals), which are examined in terms of the salience of elements presented in the video stimuli, as well as in terms of three different types of events – Support, Contact/Close proximity and Free movement of the Figure. The materials used for this experimental study included 16 video stimuli (about 2-3 seconds long) designed for elicitation of motion event descriptions, accessed through the website of the Language and Cognition Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The participants included 60 students of different Croatian Universities. The materials were distributed to them via e-mail, and the data was collected online. The results show that, when presented with a motion event that includes a self-propelled inanimate Figure whose movement is canonical, native speakers of Croatian tend to exhibit lexicalization patterns typical for the category of S-framed languages, which is attributed to the Croatian language. However, they also exhibit certain patterns that distance the language from that category, such as: they tend to omit Manner from their descriptions if they did not already express it within the verb ; they partly attest to the boundary-crossing constraint regarding the expression of Manner ; and tend to segment the Path less often in boundary-crossing situation types. Further, overall results show that they generally attest to the goal-over-source principle, even though the salience of other elements, such as direction, seems to partly govern their choices in the encoding of Path, which in turn weakens the Goal bias they exhibited. Finally, they tend to express Path elements in ways typical for the strategies provided by the Croatian language, mainly prefixes and prepositional phrases.

motion encoding ; path ; manner ; Croatian language ; source ; goal

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