Voluntary motion events in Uyghur: A typological perspective

Abstract

Previous decades have seen many studies on the expression of motion in language. Most are based on Talmy's (1985) motion event typology. While providing robust support for the typology, variations within and across typological groups have also been reported, leading to proposals to either expand the typology (Slobin, 2004; Ameka and Essegbey, 2013) or to understand it as a set of strategies that languages avail themselves of (Beavers et al., 2010; Croft et al., 2010). To further contribute to this line of research, this article examines the expression of voluntary motion by adult speakers of a Turkic language, modern Uyghur. Our analyses reveal that Uyghur is a prototypically verb-framed language. It is different from English (considered satellite-framed) at all levels of analysis and is systematic in adopting verb-framed lexicalisation patterns alike Turkish and to a lesser extent French. Our data lend support for Talmy's (2000) typology as conceived in a strategy-based typological framework (Croft et al., 2010; Hendriks & Hickmann, 2015).