An investigation of the Goal-over-Sourcepredominance hypothesis across Noncanonical Spatial Events in Ilami Kurdish

Resumen

This paper explores the robustness of Goal Path vs. Source Path in several conceptual domains of Ilami Kurdish including Manner of Motion, Change of Possession, Change of State and Attachment/Detachment events. These events have previously been evaluated by Lakusta and Landau (2005) to further determine if the reported Goal bias in English Canonical Motion Events is also attested in other less canonical events. Following Lakusta and Landau (2005), we will examine these events to see if the observed Goal-over-Source preference in Ilami Kurdish ‘placement and removal’ events (Karimipour and Rezai, 2019), as Canonical Motion Events, is also confirmed in other non-prototypical domains of this variety. To this end, two experiments were performed. In experiment 1, Ilami participants were requested to spontaneously describe a set of video clips after they watched it. In experiment 2, participants were requested to use specific Goal- and Source-oriented verbs (e.g., give vs. get) to describe a new set of video clips. Results reveal that Goal vs. Source asymmetry is a systematic pattern, even when participants are encouraged to use biased verbs to describe the scenes. It is argued that the Goal bias is the result of several interacting factors as fundamental cognitive salience, non-presupposedness and less predictability of Goal information and particularly the lexicalization pattern of Ilami Kurdish. Interacting with other aforementioned factors, the lexicalization pattern of Ilami Kurdish systematically controls the encoding of the Goal component. It appears that this template originates from Canonical Motion Events.