Chapter Three: Verbs of Motion

Introduction

Motion is intimately interconnected with every aspect of human life and activity. It is virtually impossible to tell a story without describing how the characters moved, where they came from and where they went. Despite its apparent universality, motion is encoded differently in different languages: some, like English, require its speakers to mention whether it was completed or still in progress, others, like Korean, require its speakers to mention whether there is a tight or loose fit between moving objects and surfaces they move against, and some, like Russian, require its speakers to mention whether the motion proceeds in a single direction or in multiple directions. Consequently, to fully master a motion verb system in a different language, it is necessary to begin thinking in terms of distinctions made by the language in question. This task is particularly challenging when these distinctions differ from the distinctions made in one’s native language. Thus, complex distinctions made in Russian but not in English constitute the key reason for which Russian verbs of motion are notoriously difficult for American learners.

Russian teachers are fully aware of these difficulties and most textbooks have either special chapters or at least subsections devoted to verbs of motion; there also exist a number of texts (Mahota, 1996; Muravyova, 1986; Skvortsova, 2004; Stilman, 1951) and websites dedicated exclusively to Russian motion verbs. Nevertheless, American students, even at the advanced level, still experience difficulties in using Russian verbs of motion in a context-appropriate manner. As will be shown below, we found evidence of such difficulties in our project as well.

We see three interrelated reasons for these ongoing problems: (a) conceptual differences between English and Russian in the domain of motion that require students to change their way of thinking, rather than to simply memorize new prefixes or conjugations; (b) morphosyntactic and semantic complexity of the Russian verb system, with its abundance of prefixes that allow speakers to make subtle semantic and pragmatic distinctions; (c) incomplete presentation in the teaching materials that focus more on the latter issue than on the former one.

Our analysis of texts, chapters, and websites dedicated to Russian verbs of motion points to two key weaknesses in typical presentations of the motion verb system. The first weakness is an overwhelming focus on mechanical issues, such as conjugation, at the expense of systematic practice of conceptual distinctions. Even when such distinctions are practiced, the practice, in our view, is insufficient. Two types of exercises are commonly offered to students: picture descriptions and fill-in-the-blanks. In the first case, students are invited to describe a picture or to comment on whether a particular picture represents walking (идти) or riding (ехать), carrying (нести) or dragging (тащить). In the second case, they are asked to select the word that would fit best in the context of a particular sentence. They do not however have frequent opportunities to reflect on the use of motion verbs in the context of extended discourse, such as narratives (for an exception, see Muravyova, 1986). To address this gap, exercises in this chapter aim to offer students multiple opportunities to reflect on their lexical choices and to compare them to the choices made by native speakers of Russian in the same context.

The second weakness of existing materials is a lack of research-based knowledge about acquisition of Russian motion verbs by American learners. Textbook and website authors commonly rely on their teaching experience and personal intuitions about difficulties inherent in acquisition of these verbs. The discussion below addresses this weakness as well. We will show what aspects of Russian motion system have been acquired by advanced American learners in our study and which remain challenging for these learners.

The present chapter does not aim to offer a comprehensive introduction to Russian verbs of motion. This goal is well accomplished in existing teaching materials, listed in the reference section. Instead, the purpose of our overview and accompanying exercises is to highlight areas of difficulty for advanced American learners of Russian who are already well-familiar with Russian motion verbs but are not always sure about which verbs should be selected in a particular context. Consequently, we focus our overview of the Russian motion verb system and our exercises not on the structural issues, well-covered in other teaching materials, but on conceptual differences between Russian and English and on semantic, pragmatic, and contextual distinctions encoded in Russian. These distinctions will be examined and practiced by the learners in the context of two short films that portray numerous instances of walking, riding, driving, rolling, jumping, swimming, and so on. The learners will also have an opportunity to compare their own choices to those made by native speakers of Russian describing the same films.

The chapter consists of two parts. Thе first part, Overview, discusses differences between Russian and English motion verbs in four areas where the two languages maximally differ: aspect, directionality, manner of motion, and path. These are also areas where participants in our study made most errors, consequently, our discussion will be illustrated with examples taken from the learner corpus. The second part, Exercises, offers a variety of exercises that address weaknesses in these four areas and allow students to practice verbs of motion in context. The use of films from the Mr. Bean series in these exercises aims to provide visual and contextual support for internalizing the key motion categories of the Russian language.