Expression of motion events in Farsi

ABSTRACT

The current study examines how gestural representations of motion events arise from linguistic expressions in Farsi, as this language offers many unique characteristics; exhibiting characteristics of both Talmy’s satellite- and verb-framed languages. We examined native Farsi speakers’ speech and gestures in describing 20 motion events. We focused on two motion event components: path (trajectory of motion like up) and manner (how the action is performed like jumping). Analyses of syntactic packaging and clause-level correspondence between speech and gesture, as well as parallel ordering of speech and gesture sequences were, for the most part, in support of models that posit a close correspondence between speech-gesture production. However, while Farsi speakers described both path and manner in their speech, gesture was markedly impoverished for manner, suggesting constraints on the one-to-one mapping between linguistic and gestural expressions.

KEYWORDS:

• Motion events
• gesture
• language and thought
• Persian
• Farsi

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone in the Language and Cognition Lab at Koç University for their helpful comments in this research, and Aylin Küntay for her constructive feedback on the findings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. “Charkhidan” in Farsi in intransitive.

2. All the results reported in this paper were the same with the Friedman chi-square test.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by BAGEP Award (Turkish Science Academy Young Investigator Award) given to Tilbe Göksun.