MOTION VERBS IN PERSIAN AND ENGLISH: A FRAMENET-BASED CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The current research aims at exploring and comparing the semantic frames of motion verbs in English and Persian. In pursuit of this goal, the novel Animal farm by G. Orwell (1945) was selected and compared with its Persian translation, Qale heyvanat (Atefi, 2010). The sentences including motion verbs were primarily extracted from the novel and then a comparison was made between each English sentence and its Persian counterpart. Afterwards, the semantic frames of the English and Persian motion verbs were obtained from the FrameNet database. It should be noted that when the motion verbs in English had an equivalent which could be interpreted in a different way in Persian, the Persian verb was searched for in one of the most reliable Persian to English dictionaries—Persian to English Dictionary (Aryanpur and Aryanpur, 2007). We searched for its English equivalent and then the newly obtained English verb was searched in FrameNet for the semantic frame. When comparing the semantic frames of the motion verbs in the two languages examined, we concluded that motion events in English and Persian were expressed through miscellaneous motion verbs each of which involves a semantic frame peculiar to it. Likewise, the frames may be similar or different cross-linguistically in case of semantic differences, or they might be pragmatically similar.