Manner Salience and the Translation of Motion Events from English into Romanian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62229/Keywords:
motion events, Path, Manner, lexicalization patterns, translation techniques, manner salienceAbstract
Although motion is a universal concept, languages vary with respect to the kinds of lexical items and syntactic patterns they use to express motion events. Talmy (1985, 2000) characterizes this variation in terms of lexicalization patterns, which distinguish between V(erb)-framed and S(atellite)-framed languages, depending on whether the path of motion is expressed by the verb or a satellite (preposition, particle or prefix). This article examines the expression of motion events in English and Romanian, as two languages representative of the S-framed vs. V-framed distinction; it focuses on the strategies Romanian translators employ to render directed motion structures, specifically, on the elaboration of the Path and Manner components in narratives. It is argued that, while this study does indicate a marked preference for translation strategies that mirror Talmy's lexicalization patterns, it also reveals the existence of a rich and varied class of mannerdenoting adverbial expressions, as well as the availability of a number of minor additional syntactic patterns foregrounding Manner. It is suggested that this additional data support Slobin's proposal that Talmy's Path-based typological classification be refined by further ranking languages on a cline of manner salience (cf. Slobin 2004, 2006, 2014).References
Alonso, Rosa Alonso (2018), "Translating Motion Events into Typologically Distinct Languages.", in Perspectives 26 (3), pp. 357-376.
Baker, Mona (2011), In Other Words. A Coursebook on Translation, 2nd edition, Routledge, London and New York.
Beavers, John, Beth Levin and Shiao Wei Tham (2010), "The Typology of Motion Events Revisited.", in Journal of Linguistics 46, pp. 331-377.
Capelle, Bert (2012), "English is less rich in manner-of-motion verbs when translated from French.", in Across Languages and Cultures 13 (2), pp. 173-195.
Coste, Octavian (2010), "Lexical Gaps and Troponymy. Human Locomotion Verbs in English and Romanian.", in Romanian Journal of English Studies 7, pp. 257-265.
Cummins, Sarah (1996), "Movement and Direction in French and English.", in Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 15, pp. 31-54.
Drăgan, Ruxandra (2012), Aspects of Lexical Structure: Verbs in Locative Constructions in English and Romanian, Editura Universităţii din București, București.
Folli, Rafaella and Gillian Ramchand (2005), "Prepositions and Results in Italian and English: An Analysis from Event Decomposition.", in Henk Verkuyl, Henriette de Swart and Angeliek van Hout (Eds.), Perspectives on Aspect, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 81-105.
Hervey, Sandor and Ian Higgins (1992), Thinking Translation. A Course in Translation Method: French to English, Routledge, London and New York.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2003), "What translation tells us about motion: A contrastive study of typologically different languages.", in International Journal of English Studies 3(2), pp. 153-178.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2004), "Motion Events in Basque Narratives", in Sven Strömqvist and Ludo Verhoven (Eds.), Relating Events in Narrative Volume 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, London, pp. 89-112.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2015), "Going beyond motion events typology: The case of Basque as a verb-framed language", in Folia Linguistica 49 (2), pp. 307-352.
Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav (2019), "Lexicalization Patterns", in Robert Truswell (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure, Oxford University Press, pp. 395-425.
Mateu, Jaume Fontanels (2002), Argument structure: Relational construal at the syntax interface, Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona dissertation.
Rowling, Joanne Kathleen (2003), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London.
Rowling, Joanne Kathleen (2013), Harry Potter și Ordinul Phoenix, Vol. 5, transl. Ioana Iepureanu, Editura Egmont, București.
Rowling, Joanne Kathleen (2018), Harry Potter și Ordinul Phoenix, Vol. 5, transl. Tatiana Dragomir, Editura Arthur, București.
Slobin, Dan I. (2004), "The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events", in Sven Strömqvist and Ludo Verhoven (Eds.), Relating Events in Narrative Volume 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, London, pp. 219-258.
Slobin, Dan I. (2005), "Relating Narrative Events in Translation.", in R. Dorit Diskin and H. Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (Eds.), Perspectives on language and language development: Essays in honour of Ruth A. Berman, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 115-129.
Slobin, Dan I. (2006), "What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse and cognition", in M. Hickmann and S. Robert (Eds.), Space in languages: Linguistic systems and cognitive categories, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, pp. 59-81.
Slobin, Dan I., Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Anetta Kopecka and Asifa Majid (2014), "Manners of human gait: a crosslinguistic event-naming study", in Cognitive Linguistics 25 (4), pp. 701-741.
Talmy, Leonard (1985), "Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms.", in Timothy Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 57-149.
Talmy, Leonard (2000), Toward a cognitive semantics, Volume 2: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Vișan, Nadina (2015), Elements of English Lexicology, Editura Universităţii din București, București.
Zubizarreta, Maria Luiza and Eunjeong Oh (2007), On the Syntactic Composition of Manner and Motion, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
