Дорогой русский язык,

Мы давно не разговаривали! Как ты? Надеюсь, все хорошо.

В эти недели я продолжаю изучать азы русской грамматики. Я изучала родительный и винительный падежи множественного числа, но в последнее время я также изучаю глаголы движения. Надеюсь продолжать в том же духе, теперь увидимся в следующий раз.

С наилучшими пожеланиями

Твоя подруга!

Ok this was just a mere exercise with Russian writing and an excuse to practice with what I learnt and I keep learning in this period. And last time we left off with verbs of motion. Verbs of motions are one of the toughest part of Russian language along with plural genitive, that I mentioned in my fictional letter to Russian language, for those not used to such level of specificity that I personally love. In Russia you can't and don't simply "go"!

meme taken from: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/rk9boe/russian_verbs_of_motion/

I almost memorized all the verbs I've shown in the previous diary, conjugation is not a problem. Under this aspect Russian language has an easy way to conjugate verbs compared to Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, not to mention that infernal hell that is Romance language conjugation system....

But what makes them more difficult to acquire is the way of thinking. Verbs of motions force you to think differently and expand your mind, quite literally in the semantic field since you have to use te right verb of movement to move, lol. And the ones I am studying are just the unprefixed verbs of motion, because there are prefixed verbs of motion which acquire a different meaning.

I have noticed two core elements that make verbs of motions challenging (but also fascinating from an anthropological point of view):

1) different way of seeing, thinking and reasoning behind them (this might have some anthropological roots that I have yet to discover, my research in the academic abstracts and papers still struggles to find an answer)

2) the way they are taught

In the first case we discover that there a languages that specify very much aspects of life, in this case the movement. Both in English and even worse in Italian there are few verbs to show movement. English has mainly "to go" that engulfs what Russian wants to convey with ИДТИ-ХОДИТЬ, ЛЕТЕТЬ-ЛЕТАТЬ, ПЛЫТЬ-ПЛАВАТЬ etc. Italian only has "andare/venire" that convey in a very generic way these semantic nuances.

In the second case the traditional way of conceptualizing and teaching UVoMs (unprefixed verbs of motion) is based on the rather ambiguous category "directionality" (cf. Isačenko, 1960). This traditional approach is deeply rooted in the tenets of European structural linguistics, which a priori considers any grammatical category as a privative opposition. Searching for universal semantic invariants associated with specific morphemes, structuralist linguistics abstracts from contextual factors and fails to provide an easily applicable guide to choosing the correct UVoM. And when you have to teach Russian as second language (L2) this becomes a problem.

We know that the relationship between “linguistic theories” and the way second/foreign language (L2) instruc-tors conceptualize and teach linguistic patterns under the guise of “pedagogical grammar” and “teaching methodology” is a subject of ongoing discussion and questioning. I've attended an entire course last year about Italian as second language and all theories linked to L2 teaching so I feel this ongoing discussion. All influential L2 teaching paradigms (seethe the Direct Method (cf. Besse, 2010, 9-11; Marchand, 1913;1914;1927) and the Neurolinguistics Approach (cf. Germain, 2018) just to cite a few) have been inspired by advances in theoretical and applied linguistics.

On the other hand, L2 pedagogy has always been guided by the grammar-as-a-tool-not-a-goal principle. The search for simple and intuitive tools to teach and process a second language makes L2 pedagogy very cautious regarding linguistic knowledge. I totally agree with the French pedagogue Louis Marchand when he used the metaphor of lever when teaching L2, I quote his sentence:

Like a lever we use to lift a weight should not be heavier than the weight itself, the grammar used as a tool helping L2 learners to cope with difficulties of the target language, should not be more difficult for learners and teachers than the material it helps acquire.”(cited in Puren, 1998, 52).

And it's interesting how this metaphor, manifesting the grammar-as-a-tool-not-a-goal claim, echoes the problem-solving principle known as Occam's razor, which recommends searching for the simplest possible explanations. I personally think that to evaluate whether a given teaching approach is the same awkward-to-use lever referred to by Marchand in 1920 one must take into account these elements:

• empirical research on comparative testing of teaching methods
• epistemological analysis of the linguistic knowledge underlying L2 pedagogical grammar 
• teaching methods

Considering that teachers tend to see teaching strategies they are familiar with as the only possible and correct way of presenting linguistic information to learners, it's quite clear that the current way to teach Russian verbs of motion is inefficient and only complicates things.

In the case of Russian verbs of motion (VoMs) and specifically unprefixed verbs of motion(UVoMs), the traditional way of teaching them is based on on the opposition between unidirectional vs. nondirectional (or multidirectional) motions. Linguistics such as Bernitskaїa, 2017-2019, Paškina, 2007 and Gepner in 2016 have criticized the traditional directionality-based conception of UVoMs, actualizing long-standing controversy surrounding the category of directionality in linguistics.

Russian language has a further layer of difficulty because apart from the four universal characteristics of motion–moving object, goal/location of motion, the path followed, and manner of motion –some (but not all) Russian verbs encoding motion are sensitive to the lexico-grammatical subcategory as part of the general category of verbal aspect.

This subcategory applies to a small group of imperfective verbs that have two distinct imperfective variations, each associated with one of two kinds of basic stems; think about ИДТИ-like and ХОДИТЬ-like stems. The issue is further complicated because the Russian language requires differentiation between motion on foot and by means of transportation (internally screaming). Even though there is no generic verb of motion in Russian, ИДТИ/ХОДИТЬ can be generalized for motion that does not take place on foot if it occurs within a locality or it is a fixed-route traffic and here, ИДТИ is used much more often in a metaphorical sense. I suggest to read works from Nesset, 2010; Raxtina, 2004; Nesset & Janda, 2022; Veličko, 2018, 611, and Nesset & Janda, 2022 to better grasp this.

All these complications lead to the fact that contextual meanings of different UVoMs are deter-mined by a complex combination of grammatical, pragmatic, and situational variables difficult to encapsulate in a one single “rule”. The concept направленностьдвижения (directionality of motion) has earned a reputation for being dominant in linguistics, but there is no universal consensus on the semantics of UVoMs like Paškina in 2007 noticed while analyzing and identifying 11 terminological pairs employed in Russian linguistics for this purpose. Paškina concluded that they are not very helpful in explaining them.

There is another problem to keep in mind: the definition of направленность. We don't have a single definition, for example  the Russian L2 pedagogical grammar Книга о грамматике defines it as spatial characteristic of motion. Some linguistics such as Forsyth, 1970 and Bernitskaїa, 2019 use the concept of пунктназначения/целенаправленность (destination), but again there is no universal consensus. Both Paškina (2007) and Bernitskaїa(2019) demon-strate that the directionality-based conception of UVoMs reduces the variety of factors influencing the natural human perception of motion to a single directionality without taking into account several others, such as space, time, and moving object's vs. observer's points of view.

Even the meaning of unidirectionality has not a clear definition but many researchers argue that unidirectional verbs encode the motion proceeding “in/from a single direction toward a goal”. As for nondirectional ХОДИТЬ-like verbs, their meaning is not easy to define either, so it's not an easy task^^'

Considering that most of what I said here is heavily based on this important study that I discovered these past days, I highly suggest you to give it a read to have a full grasp of what I said and think about the limits of the traditional approach that even my grammar book seems to use: https://dislaw.at/ds/article/view/106/104

Just know that the alternative approaches, such as Semantic Labeling (Bondarenko, 2023) seem to be able to make up for the shortcomings of the traditional approach and offer a more intuitive methodology for teaching UVoMs. They are situation based, item-focused, and experience-driven approaches and they converge with the principles of cognitive linguistics.

As last thing before closing this journal is that two Russia-born linguistics–Sergej (Serge) Karcevskij (1884-1955) and Alexandr Isačenko (1910-1978) –have credits for the concept of privative (asymmetrical) binary opposition (my Linguistics course memory is flooding here XD) which inextricably links to the idea of directionality.

I hope one day to find possible anthropological roots of why Slavic languages heavily rely on verbs of motions to describe space because I would like to talk about, in the meantime I salute you guys, see you next time!