| Speakers of all languages draw upon metaphorical motion to speak about less concrete topics. Time can fly by, stock prices plummet, and lovers split up. But languages differ systematically in the ways that literal motion events are described in the first place. Some languages (e.g., English) have verbs which tend to emphasize or "conflate" the manner in which the motion is carried out (e.g., slide, stumble), whereas in other languages (e.g., Spanish), verbs tend to conflate the path of motion (e.g., ascend, exit) (Talmy, 1983; 1985).;Thinking for Speaking theory (Slobin, 1996) claims that languages featuring these different conflation patterns draw attention to different aspects of motion events only when an individual is speaking aloud. In the present work, this claim was challenged and the conceptual bleeding hypothesis is proposed as an alternative. This hypothesis holds that concepts of literal and metaphorical motion are impacted by language and that this is demonstrated when bilinguals' conceptual understanding gained from exposure to a second language "bleeds" into their native language use, and vice versa.;In Experiment 1, Spanish/English bilinguals provided one-sentence descriptions of twelve videotaped motion events. Their responses were then compared to those from Spanish and English monolinguals. Results showed that conceptual bleeding occurred from English to Spanish, but not from Spanish to English. That is, bilinguals speaking Spanish used more manner verbs and fewer path verbs than monolingual Spanish speakers, but bilinguals speaking English did not differ from monolingual English speakers in their verb usage.;In Experiment 2, a corpus of spontaneous speech was created and analyzed to examine the differences and similarities of metaphorical motion in English and Spanish. A high degree of similarity was found in the underlying conceptual metaphors involving motion, but differences between the two languages were found at the level of the specification of the source domain (i.e., motion). By comparing the use of metaphorical motion in bilinguals and monolinguals, evidence for conceptual bleeding from English to Spanish was also found. The results of these two studies provide evidence for a relationship between language and thought that is stronger than that suggested by Thinking for Speaking theory. |
