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

A preference for animate entities over inanimate entities is commonly found in perception and 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. We found that inanimates are more marked by motion lines than animates in our data, while there is no difference between the two groups regarding circumfixing lines. These results persist across all global regions and styles of comics. Thus, similarly to spoken languages, visual morphology obeys what we call the Mark the unexpected! principle, defined in the context of surprisal minimization: Inanimates need to be marked in order to signal that they are moving in a goal-directed way, which is otherwise unexpected and of high surprisal. Animates are comparatively marked less because their goal-directed movements are already expected and of low surprisal. As this principle persists across modalities and their diverse expressive systems, Mark the unexpected! is a strong candidate for a cognitive universal.