HUMAN LOCOMOTION VERBS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH

Authors

  • Paula Cifuentes Ferez
Keywords: motion verbs, manner-of-motion, human locomotion, English, Spanish

Abstract

A vast amount of research has been carried out inspired by the motion event typology established by Talmy (1985, 2000), that of, verb-framed and satellite framed languages. However, hardly any research has been devoted to either deeply analyse motion verb lexicons or to explore manner-of-motion verb granularity between languages typologically different or similar (cf. Slobin, 2003, 2006). This paper concentrates on an important subdomain of motion, i.e., human locomotion, and examines the way Spanish and English lexicalise it in verbs. The first part of the paper focuses on the semantics of human locomotion verbs with special attention to the sort of fine-grained manner information that each language encodes. In the second part, an empirical study on how Spanish and English monolinguals categorise human locomotion verbs into three motor pattern categories (Walk – Run – Jump) is reported.

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Author Biography

Paula Cifuentes Ferez

Departamento de Filología Inglesa Facultad de Letras Universidad de Murcia
Published
19-01-2009
How to Cite
Cifuentes Ferez, P. (2009). HUMAN LOCOMOTION VERBS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH. International Journal of English Studies, 7(1), 117–136. Retrieved from https://revistas.um.es/ijes/article/view/48931