The Expression of Motion Events: A Quantitative Study of Six Typologically Varied Languages

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:More than two decades of intense research on motion event typology, emanating from the influential proposal of Talmy (1991, 2000) of a universal binary classification of languages into verb-framed (VF), such as French, and satellite-framed (SF), such as English, still leaves many questions unresolved. One such question is whether serial-verb languages such as Thai should be considered a third type (Zlatev and David 2003; Zlatev and Yangklang 2004), generalized by Slobin (2004) as equipollently-framed (EF). A second question is whether these two or three types should be regarded as in some sense ‘distinct’ (even if they have minor expression patterns conflicting the dominant, type-characteristic ones), or rather as forming continua with respect to certain dimensions, such as the propensity to express MANNER (Slobin 2004) or PATH (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2009). A third and related question is whether the notion of language types (with respect to motion typology or in general) should not be abandoned, and languages rather be described as conglomerates of constructions and strategies, with complex overlaps (Kopecka 2006; Beavers, Levin & Tham 2010; Croft et al. 2010). In the research reported here, we address these questions, using an empirical approach based on elicited data from six carefully chosen languages. Two of these are the Romance languages French and Piedmontese, which can both reasonably be expected to be of the VF type. We also analyzed the Germanic languages Swedish and German and the Slavic language Polish, all three typically considered as SF. Finally, we included Thai (Tai-Kadai), classified as EF by Slobin (2004).