Exploring English 'through': A contrastive study with Italian and Ladin from a typological and cognitive perspective

Spatial prepositions often lack direct equivalents across languages and become more complex when used abstractly. They are inherently polysemous, with single forms carrying multiple meanings (Taylor, 1993; Tyler & Evans, 2003), and can function across syntactic categories (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985). Although English prepositions and adverbs have been widely studied, the preposition and adverb through remains underexplored and warrants further crosslinguistic investigation. 

This paper analyses the English through from typological, contrastive, and cognitive perspectives, comparing three typologically different languages, English, Italian, and Ladin, a lesser-explored Rhaeto-Romance language. Focusing on motion events, English is classified as satellite-framed and high-manner salient, whereas contemporary standard Italian is considered verb-framed and low-manner salient (Iacobini, 2009; Talmy, 2000b). Ladin is low in motion verb types but highly path-salient, with a complex adverbial system (Irsara, 2015; 2020). More specifically, this study examines whether the semantic range of the English through is reflected in Animal Farm (Orwell, 1945/2024) and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Bach & Munson, 1970/1973), and in their translations into Italian (Bach & Munson, 1970/2014; Orwell, 1945/2021) and Ladin (Bach & Munson, 1970/2000; Orwell, 1945/2004). These are the only 20th-century English novels to have been translated into Ladin, and there are no translations of more recent English novels. Given that through has no single direct equivalent in typologically distinct languages, this paper examines how its different meanings are rendered, and whether the verb phrases align with typological classifications of satellite- or verb-framed languages. Therefore, using qualitative corpus analysis, the original English texts are compared with their Italian and Ladin translations, focusing on segments containing through and its equivalents. The analysis is grounded in Tyler and Evans’s (2003) semantic framework and incorporates Talmy’s (2018; 2000a; 2000b) typological framework of factive and fictive motion.

The hypothesis was that the semantic complexity of the English function word through would be evident and that the satellite-framed nature and high-manner salience of English would also be represented, particularly in comparison with its translations into the differently framed Italian and Ladin (Cifuentes-Férez, 2014; Molés-Cases, 2019; Slobin, 1996; 2003). Talmy’s (2018; 2000a) cognitive approach to fictive motion was expected to enhance our understanding of through in the analysed novels. Overall, it was anticipated that the translator’s voice would emerge in the rendering of through-segments, given the absence of direct one-to-one equivalents across the languages and the different choices this would necessitate.

The core of the analysis demonstrates how the English through operates in both physical and non-physical proto-scenes, with more extended senses as identified by Tyler and Evans (2003) occurring in Animal Farm. In some cases, Italian and Ladin maintain a sense of direction and passage by using adverbial and prepositional expressions. In others, they reinterpret through-passages by using more static expressions, or by using figurative language to convey dynamism and manner, particularly in Ladin. Overall, this qualitative analysis shows how detailed contrastive analyses of translations can reveal subtle differences in spatial expression, providing insight into broader linguistic conventions and creative choices across languages.