The grammars of three unrelated languages reveal how we conceptualize and express motion
What is it about?
How humans perceive the motion of a moving object and use language to express such motion has long been a topic of interest. In this paper, we specifically look at motion events that involve an object arriving at an endpoint. Based on data from three genealogically unrelated languages, we theorize how such motion is conceptually represented in the mind and how it is linguistically encoded.
Why is it important?
Our theory is unique because it distinguishes between path and direction, two notions that are usually conflated in other studies. This distinction gives us a principled way to predict what linguistic element in a sentence (e.g., a noun phrase or a verb) can lead to a telic interpretation, i.e., a reading that the event described by the sentence has come to an end. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our theory applies to three genealogically unrelated languages with very different grammars, suggesting the principles we have identified may be deeply rooted in our spatial and linguistic cognition.