My name is Julie Remizova.

I am a PhD student in the Institute for Linguistic Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg) making a research about postures, gestures, mimics & emotions in the modern languages of Europe.

I am searching for informants around Europe who want to participate in my research and answer a linguistic questionnaire.

The goal of the research is to investigate strategies of coding co-predicates of posture, gestures, mimics and emotions in the Indo-European languages.

Coding posture semantics into secondary predicates seems natural to all the languages because of the extra-linguistics factors. Due to the human anatomy we produce any action from one of three spatial positions (to stand, to sit, to lie). So in many situations it is not necessary to express this semantics by means of main predicates. The same goes for non-standard verbs of posture (to lean over something, to bend down, to raise a hand, etc.), mimics (to smile) and emotions (to be happy, disappointed, etc.). Semantically non-standard postures and emotions can be very close to each other and overlap in meanings. So it is not unnatural to combine them in one research.

All European languages allow code this semantics into secondary predicates, e.g. non-finite verb forms, preposition + noun phrase, etc. But according to language corpora different languages tend to use different grammar constructions for some verbs and use the same constructions for the others. Suggest the following examples from “Alice in Wonderland”:

(1)…she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door...

(2)…elle essayait de voir si elle serait mieux en se couchant, un coude contre la porte …

(3)…poprobovala l’ech’ na pol, upershis’ loktem v dver’

In the English example (1) ‘with + noun’ grammar construction is used to express a co-predicate with posture semantics. In French (2) an absolute construction in used. In Russian (3) a converb is used.

So the question arises: what is the difference between grammar coding of secondary predicates of posture and emotions across the European languages?

The works of C. Fabricius Hansen, D. Haug, N.P. Himmelmann, V.S. Khrakovsky, I.V. Nedjalkov, J. Newman, E.F. Schultze-Berndt are used as theoretical background. The methods include cross-linguistics studies, corpus methods, linguistic experiments, questionnaires, field work.

This photostream is used for sharing pictures and videos which were taken especially for linguistic questionnaire for my PhD research.

Please do not use this content without my written permission.

This is not me on the pictures.