Talmian Motion Event Typology: Similarities and Differences in the Sequence of Motion Predicates of Vietnamese and Japanese Domains

Abstract

Motion is a universal concept in common human perception. In the word system of a language, verb is inherently a very complex real word, both in terms of grammar and semantics, that complexity is due to the influence of the semantics of this word. However, in most of the previous studies, the authors often only focused on studying single word units, while the predicate sequence was often considered by the authors as a preposition to indicate direction, without mentioning from the perspective of functional grammar or cognitive linguistics. In this article, based on Talmy's approach according to the type theory of cognitive geometry, we have investigated and researched in detail the similarities and differences between the series of motion predicates. Vietnamese and Japanese languages with survey data of 130 moving predicates in Vietnamese were collected through the Vietnamese Dictionary (Phe, 2003) and 178 moving predicates in Japanese collected through the National Japanese Dictionary (Iwanami, 2019). Through qualitative and quantitative methods, the grammatical, semantic and cognitive structural features of the predicate represented the mode of motion; predicate expressing direction of motion; predicate expressing the cause of motion (Vietnamese) and the predicate of complex motion; spatial motion predicate; The fictitious moving predicate (Japanese) together with the sentence structure of each type of predicate sequence in both languages were analyzed to clarify the similarities and differences in the two languages. Vietnamese forms the situation in the form of a sequence of moving predicates, while Japanese mainly relies on the monovalent form or a combination of grammatical structures, a system of auxiliary verbs to form a predicate sequence that has been established by the author. On that basis, the paper also makes suggestions for making use of motion theory in teaching two languages, Vietnamese and Japanese.