Motion Event Descriptions

Our paper deals with the expression of spatial motion in the verbal domain. It focuses, more specifically, on the encoding of dynamic deixis as expressed by grammatical morphemes called “directionals” in some linguistic traditions, and it investigates the use of such directionals to encode Associated Motion.

Is motion cognition influenced by the large-scale typological patterns proposed in Talmy’s (2000) two-way distinction between verb-framed (V) and satellite-framed (S) languages? Previous studies investigating this question have been limited to comparing two or three languages at a time and have come to conflicting results. We present the largest cross-linguistic study on this question to date, drawing on data from nineteen genealogically diverse languages, all investigated in the same behavioral paradigm and using the same stimuli. After controlling for the different dependencies in the data by means of multilevel regression models, we find no evidence that S- vs. V-framing affects nonverbal categorization of motion events. At the same time, statistical simulations suggest that our study and previous work within the same behavioral paradigm suffer from insufficient statistical power. We discuss these findings in the light of the great variability between participants, which suggests flexibility in motion representation. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of accounting for language variability, something which can only be achieved with large cross-linguistic samples.

Keywords:
motion events; cross-linguistic comparison; semantic typology; multilevel models; power analysis; statistical simulations; linguistic relativity; event categorization

We trace the diachronic development of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek from its use to mark a range of spatial functions to its ultimate loss and replacement by zero. We propose that, before spreading to all syntactic and semantic contexts, zero-marking was contextually-dependent on the pre-sence/absence of a prenominal genitive modifying the head noun of Ground-encoding NPs and on the presence/absence of Region-encoding postpositions. We attribute these developments to an informational load relief strategy aimed at producing more economical utterances, as well as to language contact with Turkish, which favored structural convergence on the adpositional level between the two languages.

We examine universals and cross-linguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation.
Previous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or
intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and
semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we
introduce the ‘macro-event property’ (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event
representations such that temporal operators necessarily have scope over all subevents. A
case study on the segmentation of motion events into macro-event expressions in 18
genetically and typologically diverse languages has produced evidence of two types of design
principles that impact motion event segmentation: language-specific lexicalization patterns
and universal constraints on form-to-meaning mapping.*
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