ABSTRACT
T he encoding of motion events has been one of Dan Slobin’s most prominent topics over the past two decades. He and his collaborators analyzed cognitive and linguistic partitioning of motion events in a number of languages and took Len Talmy’s (1985) distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages as a point of departure. Verb-framed languages encode semantic information about the path of motion in the verb stem; satellite-framed languages use verbrelated particles or afxes for the semantic encoding instead (e.g., come out, drive in). The effect of this typological divide on language processing and language acquisition was shown for children’s narratives in the famous Frog Stories (Berman & Slobin, 1994), as well as for adults’ rhetorical style, or literary translations (e.g., Slobin, 1996b, 2006). Moreover, these typological differences in dividing the conceptual space seem to account for differences in non-linguistic cognition like attention and memory, mental imagery, and gesture (Slobin, 1997, 2003, 2008). In short, we think for speaking (Slobin, 1996a): the language we speak guides our attention, and we need to arrange our mental representations such that we can easily activate them for linguistic encoding.
