Looking differently at locative events: the cognitive impact of linguistic preferences

Abstract

While the Talmian dichotomy between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages has been amply studied for motion events, it has been less discussed for locative events, even if Talmy considers these to be included in motion events. This paper discusses such locative events, starting from the significant cross-linguistic variation among Dutch, French, and English. Dutch habitually encodes location via cardinal posture verbs (CPVs; ‘SIT’, ‘LIE’, ‘STAND’) expressing the orientation of the Figure, French prefers orientation-neutral existence verbs like être ‘be’ and English – unlike for motion events – straddles the middle with a marked preference for be but the possibility to occasionally rely on CPVs. Through the analysis of recognition performances and gazing behaviours in a non-verbal recognition task, this study confirms a (subtle) cognitive impact of different linguistic preferences on the mental representation of locative events. More specifically, they confirm the continuum suggested by Lemmens (2005, Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais (pp. 223–244). Publications de l’Université St Etienne.) for the domain of location with French on the one extreme and Dutch on the other with English in-between, behaving like French in some contexts but like Dutch in others.