Motion events again: Delimiting constructional patterns

Abstract

Languages can be divided into two main types depending on how they express motion (Talmy, 1991, 2000). Satellite-framed languages (S-languages; e.g., English, German, Polish) express path outside the verb root leaving the verb free to encode manner (e.g., The bottle floated into the cave), while verb-framed languages (V-languages; e.g., Japanese, Spanish, Turkish) lexicalize path in the verb root and manner in an adjunct (e.g., Spanish La botella entró en la cueva flotando ‘The bottle entered the cave floating’). However, recent works suggest that languages also exhibit intratypological variation, i.e., variation within the same typological affiliation as well as intralinguistic variation, i.e., variation within particular languages. This paper aims to further delimit motion encoding patterns by focusing on the interplay between abstract argument structure constructions, verbs, and directional satellites. Based on data from Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, we propose that (i) Talmy's (2000) typology can be better accounted for in terms of verb-construction combinability constraints and (ii) intertypological, intratypological, and intralinguistic variability in the expression of motion can be regarded as a byproduct of the availability of particular verb-construction mappings in the world's languages.