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Description
Numerous linguistic studies have shown that languages differ in the categorization and segmentation of event experiences, and that they can systematically express events with more or less detail regarding their constituent elements such as path, manner, cause, ground, etc. (e.g., Plank, 1984; Talmy, 1985; Slobin, 2000; Özçalışkan & Slobin, 1999; 2003; Stathi, 2023). For example, Talmy (1985) observed that there are languages that typically conflate path and manner of motion in the same verb (satellite-framed languages), and those that encode path and manner of motion by separate linguistic units, and thus often omit to express manner altogether (verb-framed languages). Drawing on Talmy’s typology, this paper investigates differences in the encoding of caused accompanied motion in two typologically different languages, Turkish and Croatian. More specifically, it examines how the directional verbal concepts BRING and TAKE are lexicalized in Turkish, as a verb-framed language, and in Croatian, as a satellite-framed language. Caused accompanied motion can be defined as a threeparticipant event in which the agent moves along the same trajectory as the theme object (animate or non-animate), and in which the directionality can be deictically specific or non-specific (cf. Margetts, Riesberg, & Hellwig, 2022). The aim of this paper is to identify differences and similarities between the two languages in terms of where they place boundaries between different events, what linguistic means they use in the process of event lexicalization, and what aspects or components of the event they include or omit in this process. The study focuses primarily on the analysis of two semantically general Turkish deictic verbs getirmek ‘bring’, and götürmek ‘take to’, and their Croatian translation equivalents (verbs mostly prefixed by do- ‘to’ and od- ‘from’). For the purpose of the analysis, we examined the contextual use of the selected verbs in Turkish and Croatian corpora, the way their meanings are presented in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries (TDK Sözlük; Hrvatski jezični portal; Püsküllüoğlu, 2005; Hrvatski enciklopedijski rječnik, 2002; Yeni Türkçe-Sırpça Sözlük, 2014; Boşnakça-Türkçe Sözlük, 2015), and the way Turkish verbs are translated in Croatian translations of several Turkish novels by Orhan Pamuk. The preliminary results point to some important differences between the two languages. Compared to Turkish, Croatian shows a higher level of granularity in the partitioning of the semantic domain of caused accompanied motion. For example, in addition to the path, which is encoded by a prefix, Croatian verbs obligatorily encode the manner of caused motion (e.g., odvoditi ‘to take something/someone by walking it/one’ vs. odnositi ‘to take something/someone by carrying it/one’), they can distinguish animate theme objects (odvoditi), and they offer a choice to express a vehicle-supported transportation (odvoziti), while Turkish verbs omit to encode all three specificities. On the other hand, Turkish shows a greater tendency to segment an event on the temporal level by using serial verb constructions (e.g., alıp getirmek ‘to take up and bring’, lit. ‘to take up bring’), while in Croatian such segmentation seems rather redundant (as observed in Croatian translations of such Turkish phrases).
