Telling the SugarStory in 6 Indo-European languages: What may and what must be conveyed?

“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”

Roman Jakobson (1959:236)

SugarTexts

Viktor Smith, Copenhagen Business School vs.ikk@cbs.dk

Lingue e culture europee: tipologie a confronto, Cagliari, 13-14 novembre 2007

Conceptualization, lexicalization, and verbalization of “moving, or being moved, from Loc1 to Loc2”

Suggested terms:

Smith (2003: 71ff; 2005)

The cognitive mechanisms involved appear to be universal

The linguistic means available for communicating their products display profound and systematic crosslinguistic differences

Basic assumptions:

Project focus (at least initially)

Relocation Relocation Verbs

Systematic crosslinguistic differences also dividing the Indo-European Language Family

Example:

Danish

hunden gik/løb ind

fisken svømmede ind

fuglen fløj ind

bilen kørte ind

skibet sejlede ind

Italian

il cane

il pesce

l’uccello

la macchina

la nave

entrò

Typological frames of explanation Manner (or: satellite-framed) vs. Path (or: verb-framed) languages

Talmy (1985, 2000); Slobin (2004a/b); Mora Gutiérrez (2001); Berthele (2004)

Endocentric vs. Exocentric languagesHerslund (2000); Herslund & Baron (2003); Korzen (2005)

Growth points for continued research

• Refining and differentiating the typological description of particular languages • Assessing the impact of typological differences on crosslinguistic communication and translation

• The language worldview & “thinking for speaking” dimensions

The SugarTexts Corpus provides an empirical basis for shedding new lighton these and other dimensions

The SugarTexts Corpus

Multilingual text corpus containing authentic step-by-step descriptions of the processing of sugar beets into refined white sugar in a sugar factory, as found in textbooks, technical research reports, information folders, encyclopedias, sales material, on websites, etc.

Collected and screened by the joint effort of 8 master thesis students and 1 PhD student in collaboration with senior researchers at CBS

Spontaneous verbalizations of uniform extralinguistic scenarios containing a wide variety of relocation processes and events in terms of both Path and Manner of motion

That is:

Status:Status: English:English: 17 texts, Italian Italian: 15 texts, FrenchFrench: 26 texts, SpanishSpanish: 17 texts, Danish Danish: 17 texts, GermanGerman: 32 texts, Russian:Russian: 13 texts.

Frog Stories

Related approaches

Berman & Slobin 1994; Strömquist & Verhoeven 2004

Skytte et al. 1999

The Mr. Bean Project

Virtues of the SugarTexts material: Real-life texts produced by text writers simply doing their job

Immediate intelligibility to non-specialists and “fairy-tale appeal”

Path & Manner of motion change and combine in numerous ways throughout the process

The process media are affected and evolve along the process which further differentiates their motion potential

Realistic basis for testing the impact of typological differences on crosslinguistic communication: Translating technical process descriptions is a real-life challenge to thousands of translators!

Text categorization: A, B & C texts depending on the intended reader’s expected degree of special knowledge

But how is it conceptualized and verbalized?

What we see...

The The SugarWorldSugarWorld Ontology Ontology

soilsoil

crude juicecrude juice thin juicethin juicecosettescosettesbeetsbeets

WASHING

pulppulp filter cakefilter cake

SLICING DIFFUSION PURIFICATION

thick juicethick juicemassecuitemassecuite

steamsteam

steamsteammolassesmolasses

CRYSTALLIZATIONCENTRIFUGATION

EVAPORATION

sugar crystalssugar crystals

The ontology involves a wide variety of Actions involving a change of location in terms of presence or

absence of a Figure on a particular Ground (Location)

Activities involving unstable Figure-Ground relationships on one and the same Ground (Location)

may be further specified linguistically in terms of Loc1 Loc2

PathExamples: arrive

enter

may be further specified linguistically in terms of Figure Ground interaction and compatibility (+ impact of Agent, for transitive verbs) Manner

Examples: rollsoakthrow

For further details on the semantic metalanguage: See Smith 2003; 2005a

Different languages present these variables in different ways

A first taste:

Danish: Tyndsaften pumpes til fordampestationen, hvor saften koncentreres

[‘The thin juice is pumped to the evaporation station where the juice is concentrated’] SugarText_DA 9SugarText_DA 9

Italian: Il sugo leggero passa alla stazione di evaporazione [...]SugarText_IT 1SugarText_IT 1

More examples will follow in subsequent talks by my CBS colleagues

Danish: Roerne glider direkte ind i en langstrakt beholder, roevasken[‘The beets slide directly into an elongated container, the beetwasher’] SugarText_DA 3SugarText_DA 3

Italian: Le bietole, unitamente all’acqua di trasporto, entrano nelle lavatrici

SugarText_IT 4SugarText_IT 4

Still: What we present today does not exhaust the range of linguistic phenomena and questions that are currently being explored and could be exploredin a SugarTexts context

And we might even crystallize somenew ideas today

Everyone is invited!

Project status: Text collection and “straining” almost completed

Texts used by colleagues and students for exploring verb typologies, anaphors, nominal lexicalization patterns etc. (a few articles and 4 master theses)

Next steps: Making the corpus publically available on www.sugartexts.dk

with additional multimedia ScienTainment facilities, serving as a forum for interested researches

SugarTexts Symposium with Proceedings

Development of electronic sugar processing dictionary with additional language and knowledge management tools incorporationg research results gained

Thank you for your attention!

Berman R.A. & Slobin D.I., eds. (1994). Relating events in narratives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Berthele, R. (2004): The typology of motion and posture verbs: A variationist account. In: B. Kortmann, ed. Dialectology Meets

Typology. Dialect Grammar from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Berlin & New York, 93-126.Blaser, E. & Sperling, G. (in preparation) When is motion motion? http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~blaser/motionmotion.pdf Borst, A. (2000). Models of motion detection. In: Nature Neuroscience 3, 1168.Durst-Andersen, P. (2002). Russian and English as two distinct subtypes of accusative languages, Scando-Slavica Tomus 48. Durst-Andersen, P. (2000). The English progressive as picture description. In: Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 32, 45-103. Durst-Andersen, P. (1992). Mental grammar. Russian aspect and related issues. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, Inc.Durst-Andersen, P. & Herslund M. (1996). The syntax of Danish verbs. Lexical and syntactic transitivity. In: Content,

expression, and structure. Studies in Danish functional grammar. In: H. Engberg-Pedersen et al., eds. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 65-102.

Dodge, E. & Lakoff, G. (2005). On the neural basis of image schemas. In: B. Hampe, ed. From perception to meaning: Image schemas in cognitive linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Ettin, T. (2007). Relokation i en endo- / exocentrisk kontekst. En analyse af relokationsbegivenheder i danske og italienske SugarTexts med henblik på udformningen af en oversættelsesstrategi.[Relocation in an endo- / exocentric context. An analysis of relocation events in Danish and Italian SugarTexts as a basis for formulationg a translation strategy]. Master Thesis. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.

Fong, V. & Poulin, C. (1998). Locating linguistic variation in semantic templates. In: J.-P. Koenig, ed. Discourse and cognition. Bridging the gap. Stanford, California: CSLI Publications, 29-39.

Gennari, S. P.; Sloman, S. A.; Malt, B. C. & Fitch, W. T. (2002). Motion events in language and cognition. In: Cognition 83 (1), 49-79.

Herslund, M. (1998). Typologi, leksikalisering og oversættelse. [Typology, lexicalization, and translation]. Lingvistisk Oversættelse. Copenhagen Working Papers in LSP 3. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 7-12.

Herslund, M. (2000). Tipologia grammaticale e tipologia lessicale. In: I. Korzen & C. Marello, eds. Argomenti per una linguistica della traduzione. Notes pour une linguistique de la traducion. On linguistic aspects of trans lation. Gli argomenti umani 4. Alessandria: Edizioni del l'Orso, 11-18.

Herslund, M. & Baron, I. (2003) Language as world view. Endocentric and exocentric representations of reality. In: I. Baron, ed. Language and culture. Copenhagen Studies in Languages 29, 29-42.

Ibarretxe Antuñano, I. (2004). Language typologies in our language use: The case of Basque motion events in adult oral narratives. Cognitive Linguistics 3, 317-349.

Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Brower, ed. On translation, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 232-239.

Selective bibliography

Korzen, I. (2005). Lingue endocentriche e lingue esocentriche: lseeico, testo e pensiero. In: I. Korzen & P. D’Achille, eds. Tipologia linguistica e società. Considerazioni inter- e intralinguistiche. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 31-54.

Mora Gutiérrez, J. P. M. (2001). Directed motion in English and Spanish. In: Estudios de Lingüística Española 11.Nørgaard, K.; Nielsen, L. Ø. B. (20079: Model for dansk-fransk terminologisk vidensformidling inden for sukkerproduktion. [A

model of Danish-French knowledge transfer in the field of sugar manufacturing]. Master Thesis. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.

Ozol, S. (2004). Fra sukkerroe til sukkerskål: Onomasiologisk undersøgelse af danske og russiske relokationsverber baseret på SugarTexts. [From sugar beet to sugar pot: An onomasiological study of Danish and Russian relocation verbs based on SugarTexts.] Master’s Thesis. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.

Palmer, S. E. (1999) Vision science. Photons to phenomenology. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Papafragou, A.; Massey, C. & Gleitman, L. (2001). Motion events in language and cognition. In: Proceedings of the 25th

Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Papafragou, A.; Massey, C. & Gleitman, L. (2002). Shake, rattle ‘n’ roll: the representation of motion in language and

cognition. In:: Cognition 84, 189-219.Plungjan, V. A. (2002). O specifike vyraženija imennych prostranstvennych charakteristik v glagole: kategorija glagol´noj

orientacii. In: V. A. Plugjan, ed. Grammatikal izacija prostranstvennych značenij. Moscow: Russkie slovari, 57-98. Rojo, A. & Valenzuela, J. (2001) ”How to say things with words: Ways of saying in English and Spanish”. In: Meta, XLVI, 3

467-477.Skytte, G.; Korzen, I.; Polito P. & Strudsholm, E., eds. (1999). Strutturazione testuale in italiano e in daneses. Copenhagen:

Museum Tusculanum Press. Sinha, C. & Kuteva, T. (1995) Distributed spatial semantics. In: Nordic Journal of Linguistics 18, 167-199.Slobin, D. (2004a). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In: S.

Strömquist & L. Verhoeven, eds. Relating events in narrative: Typological contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Slobin, D. (2004b). Relating narrative events in translation. In: D. Ravid & H. B. Shyldkrot, eds. Perspectives on language and language development: Essays in honor of Ruth A. Berman. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Slobin, D. (1996a). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In: Grammatical constructions: Their form and meaning. M. Shibatani & S. Tompson, eds. Oxford: University Press, 195-219.

Slobin, D. (1996b). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”. In: J. J. Gumperz & S. C. Levinson, eds. Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: University Press.

Selective bibliography

Smith, V (2005a). Modeling the semantics of relocation: For SugarTexts and beyond. Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.

Smith, V. (2005b). Motion at the sugar factory: Is Russian a genuine MANNER language? In: K. Ahmad; M. Rogers, eds. Proceedings of the 14th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes .Communication, culture, knowledge. Surrey: University of Surrey, 77-84.

Smith, V. (2003). Talking about motion in Danish, French, and Russian: Some implications for LSP in theory and practice. In: LSP & Professional Communication 2, 66-90.

Smith, V. (2000). On the contrastive study of lexicalization patterns for translation pur poses: some reflections on the levels of analysis. In: I. Korzen & C. Marello, eds. Argomenti per una linguistica della traduzione. Notes pour une linguistique de la traducion. On linguistic aspects of trans lation. Gli argomenti umani 4. Alessandria: Edizioni del l'Orso, 19-42.

Strömqvist, S.; Verhoeven, L., eds. (2004). Relating events in narrative: Typological contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Talmy, Leonard (2000). Towards a cognitive semantics: Volume 2: Typology and process in concept structuring . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: T. Shopen, ed. Language typology and syntactic description, Vol. III. Grammatical categories and the lexicon.Cambridge: University Press, 57-149.

Tesnière, L. 1976 [1959]. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. IIième édition. Paris: Klincksieck.Tøgersen, M. (2007). Når ord taler: Terminologisk undersøgelse af udvalgte begreber i danske og tyske SugarTexts – med

særlig fokus på leksikaliseringsforskelle. [When words talk: A terminological investigation on selected concepts in Danish and German SugarTexts with a special focus on lexicalization differences]. Master Thesis. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School.

Zacks, J. M. & Tversky, B. (2001). Event structure in perception and cognition. In: Psychological Bulletin 1, 3-21.Zlatev, J & Yangklang, P (2004). A third way to travel, the place of Thai (and other serial verb languages) in motion event

typology. In: S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven, eds. Relating events in narrative: Typological contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Zlatev, J. & David, C. (2004). Three ways to travel: Motion events in French, Swedish and Thai. In: A. Soares da Silva, A. Torres & M. Gonçalves, eds. Linguagem, Cultura e Cognição: Estudos de Linguística Cognitiva, eds., Coimbra: Almedina.

Selective bibliography