About our project
The project is dedicated to the typology of constructions that describe spontaneous movements of parts of the body (compare "raise your head", "stand on one’s feet" or "wag the tail").
There are numerous descriptions of semiotically loaded gestures, such as "wringing one’s hands", "pouting one’s lips", "nodding one’s head", etc. (cf. Kreidlin 2002, 2013, Kreidlin, Letuchy 2006). However, semiotics is culture specific, which makes it difficult to build a typology on this material: the same movement of the head can mean YES in one language (as in English), but NO in another (as in Bulgarian).
Unlike semiotic gestures, non-semiotic ones present an attractive task for linguistic typology. The subject is also appealing because it touches upon several well-studied areas, such as the typology of verbs of motion (cf. Talmy 1985, 2000, Slobin 2004), the typology of body parts (cf. Andersen 1978, Koch 2008, Majid 2010), and the typology of causative constructions (Comrie, Polinsky 1993, Song 2001). At the same time, for each of these areas our constructions are peripheral and thus are rarely in the focus of attention of researchers.
The movement of parts of the body does not seem to be a prototypical movement of the object from the original point A to the final point B and does not share many of the properties that are mandatory for them: more.
Questionnaire
To analyze this peculiar semantic zone, we developed a detailed questionnaire containing a set of video clips and parallel linguistic contexts and filled it with data from more than 30 languages.
Click the link to see the questionnaire on the search page or download the archive of the video clips and the table here.
All materials are collected in a single database presented on this site.
Project participants
Project leaders: Ekaterina Rakhilina, Daria Ryzhova.
Website developer and database: Anna Kondratjeva.
Students and faculty of the School of Linguistics of the National Research University, Higher School of Economics
Moscow lexico-typological group MLexT
The creators of the video card: Alexandra Matveeva, Matvey Sokolovsky, Anna Kondratjeva.
Contacts
Comments are welcome. Please direct your questions and considerations regarding our project or this site to the managers and developers of the database:
- daria.ryzhova@mail.ru - Daria Ryzhova
- an-an-kondratjeva@yandex.ru - Anna Kondratjeva
