A third way to travel: The place of Thai in motion event typology.

Abstract

It has become almost impossible to consider motion-event descriptions, especially from a typological perspective, without starting from the seminal work of Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000), and its application to narrative and to the issue of linguistic relativity by Slobin (1996, 1997a, 1997b, 2000), as also testified by many of the contributions to this volume (cf. Galvan & Taub, Ibarretxe-Antunano, Brown, Ragnarsdottir & Stromqvist, Bavin, and Wilkins). To recapitulate very briefly, in order to avoid unnecessary repetition: holding the expression pole of the linguistic sign (cf. Saussure 1916) constant, languages can be divided into path-type, manner-type, and figure-type, depending on which semantic category is preferably lexicalized in the root of their motion verbs (Talmy 1985; Slobin & Hoiting 1994; Zlatev 1997).1 On the other hand, starting from the semantic pole, and the highly abstract semantic-conceptual notion of core schema (“the association function that sets the figural entity into a particular relationship with the ground entity”, Talmy 2000b:218), which in the case of motion events corresponds above all to the category of Path, languages fall into one of only two categories depending on which form class preferably expresses this notion: the verb root, or the “satellite” – a verb prefix, verb particle, or some other kind of (subordinate) element in close association (“in a sister relation”) with the verb root. This distinction is supposed to cut a line through the world’s languages, as stated by Talmy: