Browsing by Subject "Motion"

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    Temporal expressions in English and Spanish: influence of typology and metaphorical construal
    (Frontiers Media, 2020-10-16) Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
    This study investigates how typological and metaphorical construal differences may affect the use and frequency of temporal expressions in English and Spanish. More precisely, we explore whether there are any differences between English, a satellite-framed language, and Spanish, a verb-framed language, in the use of certain temporal linguistic expressions that include a spatial, deictic component (Deictic Time), a purely temporal relation between two events (Sequential Time) or the expression of the duration of an event (Duration). To achieve this, we perform two different types of studies. First, we conduct an informational gain or loss analysis of 1,650 of English-to-Spanish translations extracted from parallel corpora. Secondly, we compare the frequency of 33 English and 27 Spanish temporal expressions in two similar written online corpora (EnTenTen and EsTenTen, respectively) and a television news spoken corpus (NewsScape). Our results suggest that English uses “deictic expressions with directional language” (explicitly stating the spatial location of the temporal event, e.g., back in those days/in the future ahead) much more frequently than Spanish, to the extent that such directional information is often excluded in English-to-Spanish translations. Also, sequential expressions (such as before that/later than) and duration expressions (during the whole day) are much more frequent in Spanish. These usage differences, explained by the variability in motion typology and metaphoric construal, open up the interesting question of how these differences in linguistic usage could affect the conceptualization of time of English and Spanish speakers.
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    Thinking-for-audio-describing: an English- Spanish corpus-based study and some didactic applications
    (Taylor & Francis, 2025-10-16) Feist, Michelle I.; Cifuentes-Férez, Paula; Traducción e Interpretación
    The description of motion has long captured the attention of researchers examining cross-linguistic differences, owing primarily to two factors. First, Talmy (1985, 2000) observed that languages differ in the type of information conflated with motion in the main verb. Second, Slobin (2004) argued that languages differ not only in the distribution of verb types, but also in the likelihood that information about how an entity moves – Manner of motion – will be included in a description. An oft-cited example of these differences is the contrast between English, which frequently encodes Manner and typically includes it in the main verb, and Spanish, which tends not to encode Manner and includes Path in the main verb, particularly if the Figure crosses a boundary (Aske, 1989). While these observations have been corroborated in descriptions of inferred or imagined motion, few studies have explored descriptions of experienced motion. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining motion descriptions in a corpus of audio descriptions in English and Spanish. Following on from this, we ask how the patterns uncovered may be leveraged to improve teaching in translation and second language classrooms.