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In:Space in Diachrony
Edited by Silvia Luraghi, Tatiana Nikitina and Chiara Zanchi
[Studies in Language Companion Series 188] 2017
► pp. 1–40

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The goal-over-source principle in European languages

Preliminary results from a parallel corpus study

 | Reading Evolutionary Biology Group, University of Reading
Published online: 14 August 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.188.01ver
This paper investigates the linguistic encoding of source, trajectory, and goal in seventeen European languages. The data comes from translations of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the ParaSol parallel corpus. The original English text and all translations display more frequent marking of goal than of source or trajectory and thus conform to the goal-over-source principle identified by Ikegami (1987). This goal bias is explained by a translation strategy where goal information is expanded upon to the demise of trajectory information, as goal information is most important for following the narrative. An attempt is made to explain cross-linguistic differences in path encoding using phylogenetic comparative methods, but unfortunately the dataset is too small to allow for generalizations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The goal-over-source principle in path encoding
  • 3.The current study: Data collection and coding
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Why do these translations display a goal bias?
    • 5.1Dependencies between path encoding measures
    • 5.2Goals are added to translations to avoid ambiguity
  • 6.Why do some translations display a larger goal bias than others?
    • 6.1Talmian typology does not explain cross-linguistic differences
    • 6.2Language history does not explain cross-linguistic differences
    • 6.3Geographic distance does not explain cross-linguistic differences
    • 6.4Further explanations for cross-linguistic variation
  • 7.Conclusion: The encoding of source, trajectory and goal in Indo-European
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • Appendix
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