The Conceptualization of Motion in Jordanian Spoken Arabic

This study is meant to contribute to the current body of research on motion conceptualization by reexamining Talmy's (1985, 2000) typological classification of motion event constructions using data from Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA). It presents a contrastive account of the lexicalization patterns of JSA motion verbs and their counterparts in English. 50 native speakers of JSA contribute to the task of compiling a large list of motion verbs in JSA. They are given a sample of motion verbs to guide and encourage them to get more motion verbs in this variety. The final version of the list contains 200 JSA motion verbs. Each verb is used in a short informative sentence to help in identifying its conceptual components in the domain of motion and to observe how the expressed arguments are encoded semantically and syntactically in a sequence. The data of motion verb sentences are validated through an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT), which is completed by 20 native speakers of JSA. The outcome is also compared with motion verbs in English. The analysis of data presents 16 lexicalization patterns embodied in JSA motion verbs. The study reveals that both JSA and English frequently utilize the satellite- (S-), verb-(V-) framed patterns and other patterns to encode Path and other components of motion. Further, many motion verbs do not yield noteworthy differences in both languages. The results of the study do not lend support to Talmy's (1985, 2000) typology of motion as the semantic and syntactic behavior of the motion verbs in the two languages seem almost similar despite the claim that each language belongs to a different language type as proposed by Talmy (1985, 2000). In light of this, these results receive support from Pinker's (1989) theory of argument structure against Talmy's (1985) typology of motion. The study reveals that when motion verbs in both languages are semantically similar, their syntactic constructions exhibit similarities too.

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