Volume 19, Issue 4

The present study reports the findings of an empirical investigation aimed at testing how salient the domain of manner of motion is in Italian. Hitherto, Italian has been as sumed to be low-manner-salient simply on the grounds that it is a Romance language. But differently from languages such as French or Spanish, for example, hardly any empirical evidence has been produced that can prove the validity of that assumption. In this study, the degree of manner of motion saliency in Italian has been investigated by contrasting it to that exhibited by a typical high-manner-salient language, namely English, which has been extensively studied from this point of view. The investigation consisted of: (a) a dictionary-based lexical survey aimed at comparing the number of Italian manner of motion verbs with that of English; (b) experimental trials with Italian and English native speakers, aimed at measuring the manner of motion salience manifest in their linguistic behaviour. The experimental work with speakers involved three tests of “ease of lexical access”, intended to establish how quickly speakers can retrieve manner of motion verbs from memory, and one test on “spontaneous narration”, designed to test the frequency with which manner of motion verbs are used during free speech. The results of the study provide the first empirical evidence that Italian does indeed show typical traits of low-manner-salience.

It is quite legitimate for Broccias and Hollmann (2007) to question the characterization of verbs in terms of sequential scanning. However, they have not advanced any cogent arguments against it. Although experimental evidence is certainly to be desired, there is no doubt about the psychological status of sequential scanning: it amounts to nothing more than the sequentiality inherent in the real-time experience of events. Its sequentiality should be most fully manifested when a verb is directly apprehended as a grounded clausal head (hence most salient); owing to general effects of compression, a more holistic view should prevail when a verb is subordinated to other elements. The arguments made by B&H concerning the English auxiliary, causatives, and path prepositions are discussed and found to be invalid. Nonetheless, their critique has shown the need for clarification and refinement and has directed attention to important issues.

Gibbs and O'Brien (1990) argue that the high degree of consistency in speakers' mental images for common idioms indicates that conceptual metaphors play a vital role in constraining the meaning of such expressions. The experiment reported here, which monitors speakers' reading of the stimuli used by Gibbs and O'Brien, seeks to uncover a phonological correlate of the same phenomenon. It is argued here that the highly constrained nature of the source domains from which metaphorically motivated idioms draw their meanings (evidenced, in the Gibbs and O'Brien study, by the consistency of speakers' mental images) causes words internal to such idioms to be highly predictable. This predictability is associated with words carrying a low semantic load, licensing their phonological reduction. The hypothesis that words internal to idiomatic expressions are reduced in duration is confirmed, and this is taken as further support for Gibbs and O'Briens' findings that metaphors are to at least some extent active in the on-line processing of idioms.