Locative Expressions in English and French

Mark Tutton

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110394108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Expressing location is one of the most common linguistic tasks that we perform in our daily lives. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis into how speakers of English and French use gesture as well as speech when describing where objects are located. It shows that spoken locative expressions are made up of both speech and gesture components, and that the two modalities contribute in a complementary fashion to convey locative meaning.

1 Introduction

Expressing the locations of objects is one of the most crucial and recurrent communicative tasks that we perform in our daily lives. From describing a pen’s location next to a telephone to stating that there is a bus stop just after the traffic lights, we must learn how to master communicating location across all different types of spatial settings. This book examines how speakers of English and French express locative information in speech and in gesture. More specifically, we examine static locative relationships: that is, relationships in which the object(s) being located (the ‘Figure’, following Talmy 2000), as well as the object(s) in relation to which this localisation occurs (the ‘Ground’, Talmy 2000), are at fixed points in space (Hendriks et al. 2004).

(1)	the book is next to the sofa

In example (1) the book is the Figure, and the Ground is the sofa. The nature of the locative relationship that holds between the two objects is encoded by the spatial item next to.

In what follows, we focus on how speakers express the nature of static locative relationships, such as that encoded by next to in example (1). We argue that both speech and gesture play pivotal roles in this process. Our research reveals that gestures express key directional information concerning the Figure’s location, and that this information relates to the locative relationship lexicalised in speech. We therefore show that speech and gesture are interconnected modalities which can express different, yet complementary, aspects of a scene or event (McNeill 1992, 2005; Kendon 2004). Our research also reveals that the objects which a speaker conceptualises as a Figure or Ground cannot be known through the analysis of speech alone. This is because speakers recurrently establish the location of the lexical Ground in their gesture space: these objects are therefore simultaneously ‘gestural Figures’. The expression of location in oral discourse works on the levels of both speech and gesture, and the information in the two modalities combines to present complete, overall depictions of locative configurations. The upshot of this twofold. Firstly, gestures allow us a much clearer insight into how speakers conceptualise locative relationships. For example, as mentioned above, an object may appear as Figure in gesture only. Therefore, to know something as basic as the Figure of a locative utterance requires us to attend to a speaker’s gestures as well as to their speech. Secondly, listeners stand to benefit by attending to speakers’ gestures, which can contain salient, unlexicalised locative information. This suggests that the gestures used in locative utterances have the potential to be communicatively important vehicles of information transfer.

1.1 Previous research into how speakers express static locative relationships

To date, the most extensive cross-linguistic research into how speakers encode static location has been undertaken by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Researchers at the Institute sought to identify a ‘basic locative construction’ (BLC) for a variety of the world’s languages. A basic locative construction is defined as a response to a ‘where’ question, such as ‘Where is the book?’ In order to elicit data, researchers presented informants with picture-based stimuli which depicted basic ‘topological’ locative relationships, such as those encoded by in, on, under, and near. The results brought to light the various grammatical classes used by different languages to encode locative semantics, as well as the different semantic features of locative relationships that achieve lexical expression. For instance, speakers of certain languages, including Dutch and German, use posture-encoding verbs in basic locative constructions. This is shown by the following example from German.

(2)	das buch	liegt	auf dem tisch
	the book	lies/is lying	on the table

The inflected form of the verb liegen in this example not only encodes static location, but also the manner in which the book occupies its location. In contrast, English typically uses the copula verb be (Levinson 1992: 29), which is neutral with regard to the semantic features of posture and position (see example 1). Similarly, French speakers use être (‘be’) or the generic locative verb se trouver (‘be found’), neither of which encodes posture nor position (see Borillo 1998). A special edition of the journal Linguistics has been dedicated to the topic of locative verbs (see Ameka and Levinson 2007) and provides a detailed cross-linguistic investigation.

The concept of a basic locative construction has therefore been fruitful for uncovering the different ways in which location is encoded in a broad cross-linguistic perspective. However, our work concerns only English and French. Furthermore, we aim to uncover the variety of ways in which speakers of these two languages express location in oral discourse. Hence, while our discussion of location will include examples of basic locative constructions, it will not be limited to them.

As far as other research into the encoding of static location is concerned, an ongoing research project by Lemmens (2005) also investigates locative verbs across a range of European languages, including English and French. Research into the expression of location that does not specifically focus on locative verbs includes work by Kopecka (2004) on French and Polish, and by Grinevald (2006) on Amerindian languages. Both these studies use the basic locative construction, described above, as an investigative tool. As far as English and French are concerned, Hickmann and Hendriks (2006) have investigated how speakers lexically encode ‘specific’ (i.e. fine-grained) semantic information relating to motion and location. Moving away from spoken languages, Perniss (2007) has analysed how location is encoded in German Sign Language (DGS), Özyürek, Zwitserlood and Perniss (2010) have investigated the expression of location in Turkish Sign Language (TID), while Eberle (2013) has looked at the expression of location – focusing mostly on relations that would be encoded by on and in in English – in five signed languages: Catalan Sign Language (CSC), Estonian Sign Language (ESO), Nigerian Sign Language (NSI), Thai Sign Language (TSQ), and Australian Sign Language (ASQ).

It is also important here to mention a doctoral dissertation by Arik (2009), which examines how motion and location is expressed by a range of signed and spoken languages. The sign languages investigated were Turkish Sign Language, Croatian Sign Language, American Sign Language and Austrian Sign Language, while the spoken languages were Turkish, Croatian, and English. Arik’s aim was to test a hypothesis, the ‘Crossmodal Spatial Language Hypothesis’, “which claims that the features from spatial input are not necessarily mapped on the spatial descriptions regardless of modality and language” (xviii). That is, as far as static location is concerned, he hypothesized that not all features of a locative configuration, such as object orientation and the distance or proximity between objects, would be encoded by speakers in their locative expressions. This was expected to hold regardless of whether the language was signed or spoken. For spoken languages he considered both speech and co-speech gestures, in order to more correctly determine the features of locative configurations which speakers took into account. The cross-linguistic analysis confirmed his ‘Crossmodal Spatial Language Hypothesis’. Moreover, results showed that gestures could express locative information using a different frame of reference (qv. Chapter 2) to that encoded in speech. His study, however, differs greatly to our own, as we discuss below.

1.2 The place of our study in the literature on space and gesture

Our investigation differs from those mentioned above in several key ways. Firstly, we are not concerned with the role of the verb in locative expressions. This is because our work is focused on the nature of the locative relationship that exists between the object(s) being located (the ‘Figure’) and the object(s) in relation to which this occurs (the ‘Ground’). This information is typically (but not exclusively) encoded by prepositions in both languages: for example, on/sur, between/entre, next to/à côté de, etc. Secondly, we present gesture as a crucial component of utterance structure (cf. Kendon 2004). Hence, we consider how speakers use both speech and gesture to express the nature of locative relationships. This multimodal approach has not been adopted in any of the studies mentioned above, apart from that of Arik (2009). However, Arik’s work differs crucially to ours in three key ways. Firstly, his is a large study that focuses on seven languages and spans three semantic domains: motion, location, and time. As far as location is concerned, he only briefly considers gesture in his analysis: it is not the subject of an extensive examination. Secondly, Arik does not attempt to identify the role of gesture in expressing locative information. Gestures are examined in order to evaluate the ‘Crossmodal Spatial Language Hypothesis’ mentioned above. Thirdly, he does not investigate the ways in which speech and gesture combine to present different, complementary aspects of locative relationships. We therefore believe that our study is the first to examine in depth how speakers use gesture to express locative information. This new approach to the topic has necessary consequences for how we understand and separate locative expressions in oral discourse. We eschew the common, grammatically-based system of separating locative expressions on the basis of phrases or clauses in favour of an approach which is more receptive to the informational contribution of gesture (qv. Chapter 4). Hence, we propose a new system for the analysis of static locative expressions which is open to the contributions of both speech and gesture.

As stated above, the nature of locative relationships is commonly encoded by prepositions in English and in French. Numerous studies have provided detailed semantic accounts of individual members of this grammatical class (see, for example, Bennet 1975 and Tyler and Evans 2003 for English; Vandeloise 1986 and Franckel and Paillard 2007 for French). However, none of these studies has considered whether speakers use gesture to express additional information relating to prepositional semantics. By taking a multi-modal approach, we show that our understanding of how speakers use prepositions requires the joint consideration of both speech and gesture. Speech and gesture are semantically coordinated (McNeill 1992), such that the consideration of one modality necessitates the consideration of the other. Therefore, our work may also be taken as a new contribution to the existing literature on spatial prepositions.

1.3 The value of a comparative English/French study

Having established that the purpose of our study is to identify how speakers express the nature of locative relationships in both speech and gesture, the question remains as to why a comparative study is being undertaken. Our answer to this is two-fold. Firstly, comparative linguistic studies shed light on the different lexical encoding possibilities available to speakers of different languages. Hence, we are interested to see whether English and French possess a similar range of lexical spatial items that encode the nature of static locative relationships. In order to achieve as detailed an analysis as possible, we concentrate on how speakers encode location along the two horizontal axes: the frontal axis, which runs front to back; and the lateral axis, which runs from left to right. Furthermore, we examine how this occurs when speakers describe location in two different spatial settings: a small internal space (a lounge room scene), and a larger external space (a street scene). This reflects the fact that spatial language changes as a function of the scale of space under consideration (Lautenshütz et al. 2007). We therefore ask the following questions: do English and French speakers make use of a similar range of lexical items to encode location, and do these items change when speakers describe location in different spaces?

Secondly, a comparative study allows an investigation of whether English and French speakers express the same information in gesture when they use semantically similar spatial items (i.e. next to and à côté de). Do both groups of speakers use gesture to express unlexicalised spatial information relating to the lexically-encoded relationship? If so, what is the nature of this information, and is it the same across the two linguistic groups? What does this similarity, or difference, tell us about the role of gesture in expressing locative information? We work from the basis of the following three hypotheses.

– Speakers will use representational gestures (qv. Chapter 2) when describing locative configurations. This follows on from findings which show that speakers use such gestures when describing dynamic motion events (e.g. Kita and Özyürek 2003; McNeill 2000b). It is also based on Krauss, Chen and Chawla’s (1996) finding that preventing speakers from gesturing reduces speech fluency when speakers express spatial information.

– Speakers’ gestures will express salient, unlexicalised locative information. This is based on earlier research which shows that not all aspects of a spatial event receive form in speech: some emerge in gesture only (Alibali 2005; Arik 2009; Emmorey and Casey 2001; McNeill 2000b). As such, gesture provides us with an ideal means of access into spatial cognition (Alibali, 2005; Hostetter, Alibali and Kita, 2007; Levinson, 2003b).

– The use of lexical spatial items with similar semantics in English and French will result in the expression of the same locative information in gesture by speakers of the two languages. This highlights the tight interrelationship of speech and gesture in the expression of semantic information (McNeill 1992, 2005; Kita and Özyürek 2003).

1.4 Structure of the book

In this section we outline how our study is structured and present a brief overview of the contents of each chapter.

Chapter 2 presents the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Language, gesture, and locative expressions: a background
• 3 Methodology
• 4 Defining and separating static locative expressions in oral discourse
• 5 Describing location along the frontal axis
• 6 Describing location along the lateral axis
• 7 How speakers gesture when encoding location with on and sur
• 8 Further findings, and the theoretical application of our results
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Index
• Endnotes