Cross-modal and cross-linguistic (a)symmetries in motion encoding of sensory perception: a study on French, Russian and Thai

One of the linguistic strategies to encode sensory experiences is the usage of directional markers (such as verbs of motion, adpositions or case morphemes) - in which case, perception is conceptualized as a ‘directional relationship’ (in terms of Huumo 2010).  By way of illustration, in (1) a visual experience is expressed as directed from the EXPERIENCER, whereas in (2) - towards them. Lakoff (1993) and Talmy (1996) observed that one and the same sensory event can be construed in two opposite directions (EXPERIENCER→ (1) versus EXPERIENCER← (2) , on rationale for this schematization see Aquilina (in press)). Such bidirectionality has been captured in the term SENSORY PATH (Talmy 1996), which will be used in what follows. 

Apart from vision, SENSORY PATH has been attested for other distal sensory modalities such as hearing and olfaction (Huumo 2010). In a study on anglophone contemporary fiction, Aquilina (in press) has shown that the directionality pattern of SENSORY PATH varies greatly in vision and hearing: with EXPERIENCER→ preferred in visual expressions and EXPERIENCER← - in auditory ones. The observed asymmetry is explained, in line with Enghels (2007, pp. 56-59), by an extra-linguistic factor of different degrees of control over the stimuli in vision versus hearing. The few previous studies on SENSORY PATH have been limited in terms of explored (i) languages (Finnish in Huumo (2010) and English in Aquilina (in press)) and (ii) sensory modalities (olfactory expressions examined (qualitatively) only by Huumo (2010)) . 

The present paper explores linguistic expression of SENSORY PATH across three sensory modalities (vision, hearing and olfaction) and three languages: French, Russian and Thai. These languages have been shown to be typologically distinct as they encode directionality of motion in different morphosyntactic devices (e.g. Zlatev and Yangklang 2004; Slobin 2004). Our research aims are as follows. First, we put to test previous findings on variation of favoured directionality patterns across the three sensory modalities (see §2). Second, we examine saliency of SENSORY PATH expressions, understood as their relative frequency, for each of the three languages. Finally, we explore whether the morphosyntactic devices used to express directionality in ‘prototypical’ motion for each language map to the devices used in SENSORY PATH expressions (French: sole finite verb of the clause and prepositions, Russian: preverbs and prepositions, Thai: verb within a serial verb construction).

To address these research questions, we have built two ad-hoc corpora: a parallel corpus of 3 fiction texts originally written in English (Table 1) and a comparable corpus of 3 fiction texts each written originally in French, Russian or Thai (Table 2). All literary works belong to a broad genre of speculative fiction. While reading each text, we manually extracted all encountered sensory expressions, be they directional or not. Addressing the first research question, our preliminary results for French and Russian confirm the aforementioned asymmetries in the encoding of vision and hearing, with olfaction favouring EXPERIENCER← pattern.

Appendix

1. She threw a quick look at a tree.
2. A tree came into her view.

Table 1 A parallel corpus of contemporary speculative fiction texts translated into French, Russian and Thai. 

Table 2 A comparable corpus of contemporary speculative fiction texts originally written in Russian, French and Thai.