Motion Predicates In Turkish: A Morpho-Syntactic Treatment

Abstract

Research on space and language has had fruitful outcomes in the last decades. One of the related domains of study is motion itself, which is central to our experience. Although the work on the semantic analysis of motion events have had fruitful outcome in typological attempts to motion event encoding, a more recent approach to the field support the idea that motion independent properties which govern the morphological, lexical and syntactic resources available to languages may determine the selection or tendency in motion framing of languages. The present study sets off to question this recent approach and focuses on actual motion events in Turkish from a structural point of view and investigates motion expressions in relation to subordination and case marking. It aims to understand what kind of case markings and subordinate expressions are used to encode motion events and to describe the relations, if any, between these structural elements and motion expressions. Apart from the structural investigation of motion expressions, the present study also addresses a preliminary analysis of fictive motion in Turkish, which is a totally different travel from the structural analysis. Two tasks were employed for the analysis of actual motion expressions and one task for the description of fictive motion expressions. Due to the nature of the content, no verbal expressions on it, and easy operability, The Pear film was taken as the first task of the study. A follow-up narrational experiment via a set of animated video clips was organized as the second task of the study. In the final section, a drawing task was administered to participants in order to account for the extent to which fictive motion is observable from the drawings. All the tasks are based on language production in their nature. The tasks were carried out online with individual participants (n=60), who are all native Turkish speakers. The findings of the study taken from both tasks found out that participants made use of certain subordinate constructions to elaborate their narrations of motion expressions. Three subordinate types were described from the frequently used ones to the least. Their relations with motion expressions were explained as encoding mainly the manner of motion; modifying the figure and/or ground elements of motion expressions. In regard to the use of case markings, three types of cases were observed in participants’ descriptions. The functions of these cases were linked to the translocational dynamics of motion expressions. The findings are in line with similar studies of its kind (e.g. Jackendoff 1990, 1996; Croft et al., 2010; Ibarretxe Antuñano, 2009 and Beavers et al., 2010) which suggest a flexible classification or continuum of motion typology since languages may exhibit more varied motion constructions than they are expected or proposed to in just two- or three-way typology. In terms of the fictive motion analysis, judging from the differences shown in drawings of fictive and non-fictive pairs, the present study suggests that there may be traces of fictive motion as if there was some form of motion effect, but further analyses are needed to make sure about that. Overall, apart from being the first investigation of fictive motion in Turkish, the present study can be regarded to contribute to the studies within the domain of motion in general and in Turkish in two ways: First, the present study tested the use of framework (by Beavers et al., 2010) which highlights the place of linguistic resources in encoding motion events in a language and as the findings suggest, that framework can be really beneficial in using linguistic resources for the analysis of motion events. Second, using tools rich of motion for the analysis of motion events, the present study can shed light on new insights which emphasize the clausal patterns in description of motion events in Turkish where path and manner verbs are used and even supported via additional uses of subordinate clauses for extended motion events and descriptions via case markings.