Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Topological relations in White Hmong and in Black Hmong: A contrastive sudy

Léa Mouton

Résumé

In the semantic domain of Space, there are different kinds of spatial relations: dynamic relations and static relations. This study will focus on static locative constructions. In this talk, I will compare the expression of topological relations in two varieties of Hmong: White Hmong spoken in the United States of America and in Thailand, and Black Hmong spoken in Vietnam. The data from Black Hmong language has been collected during a fieldwork trip in the region of Sapa situated in the North of Vietnam, and White Hmong data come from unpublished work (Ginsburg, 2013). Both works used the visual stimuli Topological Relations Picture Series designed by Bowerman & Pederson (1992). This material contains 71 pictures to elicit the expression of spatial relations. Therefore, the data collected with these stimuli allows crosslinguistic comparison. Furthermore, data from Green Hmong spoken in Vietnam and Hmong Leng spoken in Lao will complete them. This study adopts a functional-typological and cognitive perspective, following the Basic Locative Constructions' typology proposed by Levinson & Wilkins (2006). Basic Locative Constructions (BLC) are constructions that occur in response to the question 'Where is the X?' According to Talmy (1985; 2000), a static spatial expression generally involves four basic semantic elements: the FIGURE (located entity), the GROUND (locating entity), the LOCATION (spatial relation between the figure and the ground) and the SITE (geometrical property of the ground): FIGURE LOCATION SITE GROUND Hmong Lub khob nyob sau rooj English The cup is on the table Previous research on the expression of topological relations showed that languages use various morphosyntactic categories to encode those relations (Levinson & Wilkins, 2006). The SITE is mainly expressed in categories such as adpositions (prepositions or postpositions), case marking or relational nouns (on top of, in front of, see DeLancey, 1997). In addition, the LOCATION is generally expressed by a locative verb. The BLC typology (Levinson & Wilkins, 2006) showed that languages significantly differ in the type of their locative verbs. Some languages use neutral locative verb (be), many languages have a set of posture verbs suggesting human postures (sit, stand, lie, hang), and some have a set of predicates that precise the orientation and the disposition of the figure with respect to the ground (to be surrounded, to be tied, to be attached). The main goal of this study is to describe the locative constructions and more specifically the BLC in White Hmong and in Black Hmong, focusing on their verbal paradigms and the syntactic categories that fill in the SITE slot. The comparison of those two languages show that they use very similar constructions for the description of static relations. This contribution will not only extend the description in the spatial domain of Hmong languages, but it will also enhance our understanding of Southeast Asian languages. As far as I know, there are only two studies on this specific space domain so far, one from Siebenhütter (2012) on Vietnamese, and a second one comparing spatial reference in Thai, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese and Indonesian (Siebenhütter, 2018).

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Dates et versions

hal-04916929 , version 1 (28-01-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04916929 , version 1

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Léa Mouton. Topological relations in White Hmong and in Black Hmong: A contrastive sudy. 9th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference, May 2021, Genoa (virtual), Italy. ⟨hal-04916929⟩
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