Crosslanguage research on encoding coextension paths in English (L2) to Serbian (L1) translation: an empirical study

ABSTRACT

The article discusses fictive motion in coextension paths in Serbian and a possible reverse conceptual transfer in translating from English (L2) to Serbian (L1). In investigating the phenomenon, we have devised an English (L2) to Serbian (L1) translation questionnaire for Serbian learners of English to examine contrastively the conceptualization and encoding of coextension paths in English (L2) and Serbian (L1) and the processing of coextension paths in translating from L2 to L1. The presence of fictive motion in both languages implies its pervasiveness, but the frequency of individual verbs in Serbian points to the fact that certain motion verbs are rather restricted in their fictive motion usage, while English fictive motion expressions allow for a wider variety of verbs. This indicates that encoding coextension paths in Serbian is rather constrained in motion verbs usage, which should be an important distinction to follow in restraining reverse conceptual transfer.

KEYWORDS:

• fictive motion
• coextension path
• motion verb
• reverse conceptual transfer
• English-Serbian translation

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to our colleague Vladimir Figar and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Violeta Stojičić

Violeta Stojičić, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy, Niš, Serbia, English Department. She teaches Lexicology, Translation Studies, Systemic Functional Grammar, and Modern English Language. Her interests also include Corpus Linguistics and Text Linguistics. She is a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation (CIDLeS), The International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) and The Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE).

Dušan Stamenković

Dušan Stamenković, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, where he teaches contemporary English and gives tutorials in cognitive semantics and semiotics. He has presented his papers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Argentina, Romania, Sweden, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, whereas he has published his work in a number of journals, including Games and Culture and the Balkan Journal of Philosophy. His interests include cognitive linguistics, semiotics, translation, game studies, visual language, and multimodality. He is the secretary of the Center for Cognitive Sciences (CogSciNiš), and a member of RaAM, SCLA, SASE, and ESSE.