Chapter 8
Looking into visual motion expressions in Dutch, English, and
French
How languages stick to well-trodden typological
paths
This study investigates visual motion expressions
in Dutch, English, and French. As a translation corpus, I use Roald
Dahl’s children’s book The Witches, which abounds
in staring and peeping events, and its Dutch and French
translations. Based on the hypothesis that languages’ constructional
repertoires for physical motion are exploited for visual motion, one
can predict, correctly, that Dutch uses its syntactically wide
variety of path complement types in the domain of visual motion. It
is tempting to assume that French, lacking looking verbs expressing
path, would lose its generally verb-framed nature in visual motion
descriptions. However, French appears to preserve some of its
typological identity, by using causative path verbs such as
lever ‘raise’ combined with an object meaning
‘one’s eyes/gaze’. In keeping with its verb-framed nature, French
uses fewer visual path complements than Dutch and English, but it
does have, and frequently uses, manner-of-vision expressions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.What is visual motion, and how fictive is it?
- 3.Hypotheses and predictions
- 3.1Rationale
- 3.2Specific hypotheses and predictions
- 3.3Interim summary
- 4.Method
- 5.Results
- 5.1Visual motion in Dutch: Parallels with physical motion
- 5.2Path of vision in French: Still some verb-framing devices
- 5.3Manner-of-vision verbs and verb-external paths of
vision: Partially confirmed typology-based predictions
- 5.3.1Availability of manner-of-vision verbs
- 5.3.2Frequency and complexity of paths of vision
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References
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Appendix