UNIDIRECTIONAL AND MULTIDIRECTIONAL MOTION IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH AS A REFLECTION OF SPATIAL WORLDVIEWS

Abstract

Russian possesses a grammatically obligatory opposition between unidirectional and multidirectional verbs of motion (e.g., идти vs. ходить, ехать vs. ездить), a category absent from English, which relies on a single verb (go, walk) supplemented by aspectual, prepositional, and adverbial means. This study applies the comparative-contrastive method, supported by componential and cognitive-typological analysis, to establish how the two languages distribute the semantic parameters of directedness, iterativity, and manner across their motion-verb systems. Data were drawn from monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, academic grammars, and corpus examples of the two languages, and were analyzed within Talmy’s typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages and within the framework of the linguistic picture of the world (языковая картина мира). The results show that Russian obligatorily encodes directedness and iterativity in the verb root itself, bundling habituality, round-trip completion, and general capacity into a single multidirectional form, whereas English treats manner as the core lexical content of the verb and relegates directionality and frequency to optional adverbial, aspectual, and modal means. These findings are discussed as evidence of two distinct, habitual construals of motion in space, with direct implications for translation practice and for the pedagogy of Russian as a foreign language