Drawing the direction of Estonian verbs

Abstract In this chapter, the findings of a free-form drawing task conducted with 21 native speakers of Estonian are presented. The subjects were asked to draw and simultaneously verbalize their schematic representations of 24 Estonian verbs. For each drawing, a set of features was manually annotated, including the direction. Cluster analysis was then used to analyse the data, using four possible directions as variables. The output revealed three distinct clusters for verbs with a dominant direction upwards, downwards or to the left, and a fourth cluster for verbs with several directions. The reasons for such division of verbs between those clusters is discussed, as well as the question why no cluster was formed for the direction to the right.