1.2 The Typology of Motion Events and Motion Verbs

Motion is central to human’ s activity and the encoding of motion events reflects the relation between thought and language. Talmy (2000) describes a motion event as a situation containing movement or maintenance of a location. To express motion events, languages tend to include similar conceptual components. Talmy (2000) develops an analysis of transitional motion events with four basic conceptual components, as illustrated in (7).

(7) Figure: the moving entity

Ground: the entity that the Figure moves in relation to Motion: the presence of motion

Path: the course followed by the Figure with respect to the Ground

These conceptual components may be packed in a sentence to express a single motion event. For example, in (8), the sentence describes the Figure (Phil) carried out a Motion (move) along the Path (towards) with respect to a Ground (the window).

Besides the main event composed of the four components, co-events expressing the manner or cause of motion may also be included in motion events encoding. For instance, in (9), besides the figure’ s motion into the cave, the verb run also specifies the manner in which the motion is carried out.

(9) He ran into the cave.

Though languages tend to include similar conceptual components to express similar events, they show systematic distinction as to how these conceptual components distribute across constituents in a sentence. Based on Talmy ’s motion events typology, languages which incorporate path into the main verb are called verb-framed languages with languages such as Spanish, French, Korean and Japanese falling into this type; in contrast, languages which incorporate manner into the main verb but encode path as satellites are called satellite-framed languages with English,Russian and German as representative languages. The distinction between two types of languages can be attested in a pair of sentences expressing the same scene in English and French in (10). In (10)a the manner of motion is incorporated into the verb fly, but in (10)b the path is encoded in the verb sort“exit”.

(10) a. An owl flew out of the hole in the tree. (Slobin, 2004)

b. D’ un trou de l’ arbre sort un hibou.

of.a hole of the.tree exits an owl

“An owl came out of a hole in the tree.”(Slobin, 2004)

(Cited in Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 2014)

In addition, serial verb languages such as Thai, Emai, and Ewe are found to encode both manner and path into verbs, so a third type of language is suggested, i.e.equipollently-framed languages (Slobin, 2004; Zlatev, Yangklang, 2004). For example, in (11) manner and path are both expressed in main verbs in Thai.

(11) chán d??n khaw paj

I walk enter go

“I am walking in (away from the deictic center, into something).”

(Zlatev, Yangklang, 2004)

However, recent work argues that the two fold or three fold classification of languages appears to be too simplistic, as languages often use more than one type of lexicalization patterns to express motion events. It is argued that most languages use both verb-framed and satellite-framed lexicalization patterns, and some languages are even attested to use all of the three patterns.

Besides the differences reflected in language structures, the typological difference can also be attested from the size of the motion verb lexicon. Based on a series of studies, Slobin (2004) finds that satellite-framed languages tend to have a larger manner verb lexicon. Similarly, Verkerk (2014) also finds the correlation between the language type and the size of the path verb lexicon: Verb-framed languages tend to have a larger path lexicon.

In addition, motion verbs from typologically different languages are also reported to have distinct lexicalization properties. Slobin (2004) and Shi and Wu(2015) point out that verb-framed languages are more likely to accept a kind of semantically synthetic verbs in which both manner and path are encoded simultaneously. In equipollently-framed languages such as Thai, used in serial verb constructions between pure manner and pure path verbs, a type of motion verbs such as tók “fall”, lòn “fall”, lóm “collapse”, hòklóm “trip and fall”and com “sink”are also said to encode both manner and path information. For instance, phlòo “pop out”expresses a motion going through a landmark and also some manner related information such as purposive action. (Zlatev, Yangklang, 2004) Though the lexicalization patterns of these verbs have not been talked about under the rubric of the MRC, if they indeed lexicalize the two components together, they challenge the validity of the MRC.