How Birds Fly Differently Across Languages?—Manner Salience of Flight Events in English and Chinese

The portrayal of motion events across languages has been extensively explored, typically focusing on human locomotion. This study, however, diverges from the norm by examining the representation of motion events associated with avian species. The research scrutinizes how motion events involving avian species are represented in English and Chinese, focusing on manner of motion. English utilizes a wider variety of specific manner verbs, often borrowing from adjacent categories, while Chinese relies more on basic manner verbs and manner adverbials. An additional exploration utilizing a parallel corpus highlights a prevalent reliance in Chinese on the basic manner verb 飞 fēi “fly.” Notably, disparity in manner salience in describing flight events emerge early in linguistic development, even in children’s lyrics. The factors contributing to the gap of manner salience include openness of manner category, the accessibility of manner expressions and the analyticity of languages.