Analisi preliminare delle strategie di lessicalizzazione degli eventi di moto in italiano e in cinese

Languages of the world are considerably different with respect to the lexicalization patterns to express motion events. This domain can hardly be explored without mentioning Talmy’s theoretical framework, according to which languages can be divided into ‘verb-framed’ and ‘satellite-framed’ (Talmy, 1991). According to this classification, Italian is considered a verbframed language (1), whereas Chinese is classified as satellite-framed (2). However, Chinese has been also classified as ‘equipollently-framed’ (Slobin, 2004, 2006) and Italian cannot categorically be classified as ‘verb-framed’, considering the productive system of verb-particle constructions (Jezek 2002, Masini, 2005). The cross-linguistic variation has been approached by different perspectives and frameworks. In particular, narrative texts have been used to confirm the validity of typological classification (Chen and Guo, 2008) and to elicit the different information about motion events provided by the translated versions of the same source text (Slobin, 2005). This paper focus on the differences between Chinese and Italian in expressing motion events by comparing translated narrative texts. To this end, a corpus consisting of Chinese translated texts and Italian translated texts, all belonging to contemporary literature has been collected and analyses. The results confirm the loss of information regarding the manner and the omission of deictic elements, especially in Italian target texts, and show, at the same time, the rendering and specification, by added information, of the motion events in Chinese target texts’ descriptions.