Thinking-for-audio-describing: motion events in the film The Hobbit: An Unexpected JourneyMolés-Cases, Teresa
2025 Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
doi: 10.1080/03740463.2024.2413789
This study examines motion events in the English and Spanish audio-described versions of the film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, pursuing two main research questions. First, to determine the ways in which linguistic typology and factors inherent to audio description (AD) have a combined impact on the lexicalization of motion events in the product of AD. Second, to identify the distinct features of the Thinking-for-audio-describing phenomenon. The preliminary results confirm the hypothesized impact mainly in terms of the expression of manner in the Spanish AD, and identify a series of compensations for Thinking-for-audio-describing through acoustic elements.
Motion in event structureWidoff, Andreas; Blomberg, Johan
2025 Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
doi: 10.1080/03740463.2024.2427520
According to a localist theory of event semantics, event types such as state changes and realisation of actions are based on motion events, which are taken to be the primary type of event. The present paper investigates some claims of this theory, their consequences and conceptual foundations. It argues that the theory suffers from two flaws. First, the theory proposes parallels between event types that, upon closer scrutiny, appear to be absent. Second, it purports to derive time from motion, which is conceptually dubious, because motion presupposes time, while time does not presuppose motion. We propose that a more promising basis for a theory of events that attempts to generalise over event types is to ground event structure in the temporal domain. The foundational contrast between events would then not be motion and stationariness but rather the presence or absence of change, which is a ubiquitous, domain-neutral condition that is made possible by time.
Conceptualisation of motion events: language specificity and event construalVesnina, Nataliia
2025 Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
doi: 10.1080/03740463.2024.2414652
Following the proposal that language-specific features could influence the processes of segmenting and selecting entire events to be verbally communicated, this study examines the typological features of the information structure and linguistic construal of motion events within a narrative. Thirty-five French speakers and twenty-nine Swedish speakers were asked to describe six short cartoons that included various instances of motion. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the elicited narratives brought to light some interesting cross-linguistic differences. The speakers of each language demonstrated systematic preferences for/biases towards certain types of linguistic construals (including the choice of translocative vs. non-translocative construal, or the choice between Object-centred vs. Viewpoint-centred frame of reference), and differences in the ways they segmented the stream of events into propositional units and selected those that would be verbalised.
The place of Bulgarian and Russian in post-Talmian motion event typology: A Holistic Spatial Semantics AnalysisKrumova, Ralitsa; Zlatev, Jordan
2025 Acta Linguistica Hafniensia
doi: 10.1080/03740463.2024.2414651
The traditional Talmian binary typology of satellite-framed vs. verb-framed languages has proven to be insufficient for showing the diversity across the world’s languages. One approach within post-Talmian motion typology follows Holistic Spatial Semantics, which has been applied to languages like Swedish, French, Thai and Telugu, but not to Slavic languages. This motivates the present research. We used “frog stories” and analysed translocative motion event descriptions, given by nine native speakers of Russian and seven of Bulgarian, all adults. The descriptions were first segmented into clauses and each clause was analysed with respect to the key categories of Path, Direction, Region and Manner. The results show that the two languages pattern differently, most significantly in the expression of Path and Manner. We conclude that Russian shares features of languages like Telugu by encoding Path by case markers, and features of languages as Swedish, through a predominance of Manner verbs. Bulgarian differs typologically from Russian by lacking cases and using motion verbs, either to express Path, similarly to French, or to express Manner, similarly to Swedish. These findings show that Slavic languages should not be simplistically placed within a single type and provide additional support for Holistic Spatial Semantics.