ISSN: 1139-8736
Depósito Legal: B-48039-2000

3.1.3. Summary

The analysis of literary works and their translations has shown that English and Spanish authors seem to be influenced by the way their respective languages characteristically express directed motion. English authors tend to offer a more elaborate dynamic rendering of the trajectories and have at their disposal a larger number of highly specific manner of movement verbs that readily combine with complex paths, producing a frequent pattern of event conflation, where a directed motion event is combined in the same clause with another event, usually an activity, which conveys either the manner, the sound produced, the cause, or just a concomitant action associated with the motion.

On the other hand, Spanish novelists do not seem to pay so much attention to manner nor to the descriptions of complex paths. They prefer to offer elaborate portrayals of the setting where the motion is taking place. Thus, most of the elements of the trajectories, and even the manner can be inferred from the contextual setting. In any case, when they offer elaborate descriptions of a trajectory they do so by breaking up the complex path into its simpler components presenting each in a different clause headed by a path verb, rather than by accumulating them with a single verb.

Slobin and his colleagues have found the same patterns in novels from other satellite-framed languages (German and Russian) and verb-framed languages (Turkish and Hebrew). German and Russian writers also pay much more attention to manner and offer more elaborate descriptions of path than Turkish and Hebrew authors. On the other hand, the latter tend to provide more information about physical setting, leaving much of the information about path and manner to be inferred. Also, in translations across the typological divide, manner is often omitted and path complexity reduced when translating into a verb-framed language, and information about manner of motion added when translating in the opposite direction. (see Max-Planck-Institute 1997)

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ISSN: 1139-8736
Depósito Legal: B-48039-2000