Encoding motion in Norwegian L2 by Russian native speakers: an experimental study

Abstract

Talmy’s typological classification is an important work in the field of linguistics and psycholinguistics. The aim of Talmy’s work is to find common patterns for semantic and surface relations, both within a language and across languages. Due to strong criticism by other linguists, Talmy revised and modified his typological classification several times. In Talmy’s latest typological classification, languages can be divided into two groups: verb-framed languages (V-languages) and satellite-framed languages (S-languages).

In this work, Talmy’s typological classification has been applied to Russian and Norwegian, which are generally classified as S-languages. However, neither Norwegian nor Russian is strictly an S-language in the understanding of Talmy. Moreover, they are not absolutely similar due to their specific features of motion encoding.

Our hypothesis is that the differences in morphological realization will form an area of difficulty in the translation of motion events between Russian and Norwegian. To test this hypothesis, native Russian speakers were asked to translate 30 sentences from Russian to Norwegian. The test results tend to confirm our hypothesis.