Re: The difficulties of judging a language which you don't speak natively (was Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English)

Javier BF scripsit:

> "El hombre bajó de vuelta corriendo al interior del sótano"
I'm not a hispanophone, but it seems to me that this foregrounds "the
inside of the cellar" in a way that the use of "into" in the English
does not.  When I tested the English sentence on two native Spanish
speakers, they both produced translations (identical modulo the word
for "cellar") using the verb "volvio", leaving the "down" and "into"
components implicit.  When I talked about the kids and how they tell
the story of the deer, the boy, and the frog, they both agreed that
the way the 9-year-old Spanish-speaker talks is indeed characteristic:
the static layout is described and backgrounded, and then path-motion
verbs are used to provide the minimum necessary cues.

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