Mark the unexpected! Animacy preference and goal-directed movement in visual language

In our corpus study based on a cross-cultural set of 331 comics from 81 countries, we asked whether animacy preference plays a role in the morphological marking of motion in the visual language(s) used in comics. We were interested in whether animates or inanimates are more or less marked (i.e., use pictorial cues to signal motion) when compared to each other, similarly to differential marking modulated by animacy in grammars of many languages.

We considered the animacy preference as the expectation that animates are moving in a goal-directed way, while inanimates are not (Opfer, 2002). We focused on motion lines (i.e., lines trailing behind a moving object) and circumfixing lines (i.e., lines surrounding a moving object) that indicate motion in comics, which are visual morphological markings that differ in their goal-directedness: Motion lines are goal-directed, while circumfixing lines are not.