Kiyoko Toratani, York University
The role of sound-symbolic forms in Motion event descriptions
Talmy (1991, 2000) divides world languages into two typological groups on the basis of which element conveys the concept of Path in Motion events: (a) ‘satellite-framed languages’ that represent Path in a satellite (e.g. English) and (b) ‘verb-framed languages’ that represent Path in the verb-root (e.g. Spanish and Japanese). In verb-framed languages, the Co-event (a secondary event to the main Motion event) is expressed typically by a gerundive form (e.g. flotando ‘floating’ in (1)). While previous literature notes that some verb-framed languages employ sound-symbolic forms such as ideophones and mimetics to express a manner of motion (e.g. Slobin 2004), the role they play in Motion event descriptions has not been fully explicated. This paper examines the case of mimetics in Japanese. Drawing on the eight relations (e.g. Manner, Cause) that can be borne by the Co-event to the Motion event (Talmy 2000), this paper shows that mimetics can be employed to specify two relations (i.e. Concurrent Result and Manner).
I gathered 527 tokens of mimetics from literary works. Among them, 74 mimetics (74/527=14%) appear in a clause that describes a Motion Event. This proportion suggests that translational motion is not the primary semantic domain mimetics cover. Of the 74 mimetics, 59 mimetics (59/74=80%) appear as a sole element that denotes the Co-event of a Motion event. They are found to specify the relation of (i) Concurrent result and of (ii) Manner, as exemplified in (2) and (3) respectively. In the Concurrent result relation, the Co-event takes place concurrently with the resulting component of the motion. The meaning of the sentence (2a) can be decomposed into two subevents as indicated in (2b): the main Motion event in which the door moves across the opening, and the Co-event in which the door slams. The mimetic bataN ‘sound of a slam’ expresses the slamming event by capturing it in terms of the sound emitted when the door shuts. On the other hand, in the Manner relation, the Co-event takes place simultaneously with the Motion event, while specifying an additional activity exhibited by the Figure (the entity that moves). In (3), the mimetic koso-koso denotes a stealthy manner, which is construed as the manner exhibited by the Figure as it moves away from the speaker. A key point of (2) and (3) is that the predicate represents Motion+Path whereas the mimetic solely represents the Co-event. The remaining mimetics (15/74=20%) appear as an additional element to a verbal form that specifies the Manner relation: e.g. in (4), the gerundive form arui- ‘walk’ denotes a Co-event that bears the Manner relation to the main Motion event, and the mimetic basya-basya ‘sound of sloshing’ refines the manner of walking. An important point of this example is the Co-event is distributed between the gerundive form and the mimetic (cf. (3)). The other six relations (e.g. Cause) that can be borne by the Co-event to the Motion event must be expressed by either a gerundive type construction or a compound verb (e.g. (5)), indicating that mimetics are not the principal forms onto which a Co-event is mapped in Motion event descriptions in Japanese.
Recently, Len Talmy notes that sound-symbolic forms can be included in a type of constituent that represent Manner, while commenting further that the constituent type ‘seems […] to be additional (and perhaps ancillary) to that of another constituent type […and] -- the non-finite verb type and the sound-symbolic type -- together as a pair serve for the characteristic representation of Manner’ (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2005:344). This paper shows that this observation by Talmy basically holds for the case of Japanese mimetics, but points out that (i) mimetics do not have to be anchored to a non-finite verb type that represent Manner and that (ii) mimetics abound in forms that portray the Concurrent Result relation.
DATA
(1) La botella entró a la cueva flotando. ‘The bottle floated into the cave’.
Concurrent Result
(2) a. doa-ga batan-to simat-ta
door-NOM MIMETIC-P(article) close-PAST
‘The door slammed shut.’
b. [the door MOVED TO A-POSITION-ACROSS-AN OPENING]
WITH-THE -CONCURRENT RESULT-OF [the door slammed](Talmy 2000: 47)
Manner
![Text Box: (3) titi-wa […] koso-koso-to […] hait-te-it-ta
father-TOP MIMETIC-P enter-LINKER-go-PAST](Toratani_files/image001.gif){kind=small}
Manner
Cause
(5) tento-ga toppuu-de keekoku-ni huki-tobas-are-ta
tent-NOM gust.of.wind-by gully-LOC blow(V1)-let.fly(V2)-PASS-PAST
‘Our tent got blown down into the gully from a gust of wind.’
Selected References
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2005. Leonard Talmy. A windowing to conceptual structure and language. Part 1: Lexicalization and typology. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3: 325-347.
Slobin, Dan. 2004. The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Stromqvist & L. Verhoeven (Eds)), Relating events in narrative: Vol. 2. Typological and contextual perspectives, pp. 219-257. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbraum Associates.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. 2, Concept structuring systems. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
