Cognition and spatial representations beyond language use

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• Efstathia Soroli and Maya Hickmann, Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage, CNRS and Universite de Paris 8
• Tuesday 08 December 2009, 16:00-17:30
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Chris Cummins.

Languages differ in how they lexicalize and grammaticalize spatial information (Talmy, 2000). Such properties constrain how speakers organize spatial information to encode motion in discourse (Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Hickmann et al., 2008; Slobin, 2004), thereby raising new questions concerning the relation between language and cognition. Germanic languages (verb-framed) such as English express manner in the root verb and path in satellites, while Romance languages (satellite-framed) such as French lexicalize path in the verb, leaving manner implicit or expressing it in the periphery of the sentence (e.g. She ran across the street vs. Elle a traverse la rue [en courant], Lit. ‘She crossed the road running’). Such striking differences are of great relevance for opening new perspectives in the study of linguistic pathology and more specifically for the study of aphasic patients who typically present dissociations between lexical and grammatical capacities and deficits.

This talk is part of the RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building
• RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia

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