Abstract
In this chapter, I assess the classification enhanced and proposed in Chap. 3 by means of an empirical study that brings to light the evidence of conceptual discrepancies between languages. The empirical study involves language tests performed with native speakers of Chinese, Italian and Slovenian, who were asked to assess their perception of the degree of completion of the action expressed by verbs. The study attempted to prove two main ideas. (1) That unrelated languages show a greater degree of semantic discrepancy, which is due to structural differences between languages, but also to the idiosyncrasy of conceptualisation in the context of the native language. (2) That the interpretive freedom of the completion of Chinese monomorphemic verbs leads native Chinese speakers to focus more on the category of process than on result, linguistically, but also more generally. The main part of this chapter is devoted to the contrastive analysis and the interpretation of the results for the three languages studied. In the last part, I go into more detail on the use of aspectual markers collected in the language tests to show the different degree of interrelation between lexical and grammatical aspects in the languages studied.
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Notes
- 1.
The corpus for Tests 1 and 2 comprised 76 verbs (32 accomplishment verbs, 31 achievement verbs, 8 activity verbs and 5 semelfactives).
- 2.
The native speakers were undergraduate or postgraduate university students from different fields of study at Beijing Capital Normal University (China), the University of Primorska (Slovenia) and the University of Trieste (Italy). The ages of the men and women ranged from 19 to 29.
- 3.
When I talk about the degree of completion of a verb, I refer to the binary possibility of interpretation, namely the degree of completion and the degree of termination of the action, which depends on the verb type, as already explained in Chap. 3.
- 4.
The verbs are proposed here in the forms used in the test.
- 5.
This interesting influence of negative connotations in the Chinese language has also been pointed out by prof. Zhao Yang, deputy head of the School of Standard Chinese as a Foreign Language at Peking University, who stressed in an informal interview that there is a tendency in Standard Chinese to avoid using the plural denominator ‘men 们’ with nouns that carry a negative connotation, for example, enemy and murderer. Unfortunately, I have not yet found a scientifically supported study for this assumption.
- 6.
In Xiao and McEnery, two types of verbs are proposed: simplex and complex achievements. Simplex is just an achievement verb, while complex is the composition of an action verb denoting a process and a completive, result-state or directional RVC denoting the result (Xiao and McEnery 2004, 211–212).
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Čok, T. (2023). Empirical Evidence of Conceptual Discrepancies Between Languages. In: Cognitive Implications for Raising Cross-language Awareness in Foreign Language Acquisition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27829-7_4
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