Constructions expressing voluntary and caused motion events in Polish. Evidence from Oral Narratives

In the present analysis of the voluntary and caused-motion data in Polish, we drew on the elaboration on Talmy’s typology carried out by Croft et al. (2010) and concentrated on event types rather than classification of a language as a whole. Croft et al. (2010) describe a number of factors which determine the level of integration of the construction used for describing a given motion situation. In a nutshell, the more untypical path or manner of motion, the more the construction diverges from the common pattern of expressing motion in a given language. The aim of the present study was to discuss the syntactic constructions used for rendering motion in Polish as well as to reveal factors which determine the choice of a specific syntactic construction.In the present study we partially confirmed Croft et al. ‘s hypothesis (2010) and shown that in Polish the untypical manners of motion are lexicalized by means of constructions, which integrate Manner to a lesser degree than double-framed construction. The same concerns the Path up, which correlates to some extent with VF construction. Finally, our analysis showed that the constructions used for the lexicalization of caused motion deviate from the patterns established for voluntary motion and require further research.