MINDING YOUR MANNERS: LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY IN MOTION

Resumo

Do speakers think about the world differently depending on the language they speak? In recent years, this question has generated substantial interest in the cognitive sciences, driven in part by Talmy’s (1985; 2000) observations regarding the typology of motion descriptions. However, a flurry of research (CIFUENTES-FEREZ; GENTNER, 2006; GENNARI et al., 2002; NAIGLES; TERRAZAS, 1998; PAPAFRAGOU; HULBERT; TRUESWELL, 2008; among others) has produced mixed results, leaving us no closer to understanding the role of language in motion event cognition. In this paper, I revisit the linguistic analysis, combining Talmy’s observations with those of Slobin (2004) to refocus the question on the differential salience of Manner across languages. I then present results from three studies that suggest that cross-linguistic differences in the salience of Manner are connected to speakers’ likelihood of encoding Manner information, in line with the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis.