Mercredi 7 décembre, dans le cadre du séminaire LàB, nous recevrons Aurélie Barnabé, MCF en linguistique anglaise à U Clermont Auvergne. Salle E-108.
Motion events assessed through linguistic facts and kinaesthetic performances: from a cognitive reading to an enactive analysis
The present investigation relies on the hypothesis according to which sensorimotor processes contribute to elaborating meaning and hence influence linguistic data. Relying on the Talmian typology, the exploration here displayed aims at assessing the linguistic behavior of French and English speakers, asked to describe entities in motion, in contexts where participants are submitted to different physical constraints pertaining to bodily experience.Spoken corpora are collected in this corpus-based experiment, through which the frequency and the distribution of space markers (verbs and closed-class grammatical units) used by speakers are evaluated in the linguistic data gathered. This work of research seeks to explore the dichotomy that exists between English, as a satellite-framed language and French, as a verb-framed language. The analysis of the oral corpora questions the maintenance of the affiliation of each language to a specific language type (e.g. English as a satellite-framed language) once speech is implemented in discursive contexts, with specific bodily constraints imposed on the speakers interviewed.Through the non-linguistic variable here considered, the impact of speakers’ bodily processes on the linguistic data collected is assessed, hence highlighting the potential relationships between two phenomena: the linguistic fact and the kinaesthetic performance. Through the analysis of a non-linguistic variable, the speaker is not apprehended as representing the world, but as enacting it.Language is hence not scrutinised through a representationalist dimension with the cognitive load it underlies, but it is considered through the enactive paradigm through which a different reading of the linguistic data is suggested. The mutual influence observed between speakers’ linguistic behaviour and the sensorimotor experiences they go through in both languages examined will constitute the object of an epistemological debate.