‘Path’ and ‘Manner’ in The Serialization of Motion Verbs

Verbs are one of the most basic vocabulary elements of the language. These words express the being, manners and movements of beings in the universe. However, in order to express the movements of living and non-living beings in the universe, the verb category creates syntactic and semantic situations by performing some combinations within itself. Because the many movements of many beings in the universe cause endless combinations to appear. In order to express this, the verb category creates various combinations within itself. The most typical example of this is seen between motion verbs, which is a semantic class, and serial verb structures, which are a syntactic and semantic class. Although there have been various studies on motion verbs, the limits of these verbs have not been determined in Turkish studies. Motion verbs, which can be considered as verbs expressing the displacement of beings in the universe, are closely related to serial verb structures, which is a syntactic and semantic category. Serial verb structures contain at least one motion verb in surface or deep structure. According to Talmy's typology, these verbs of motion mark the "way" where the movement takes place, or the "style", which is the way it takes place. In this study, the roles of "path" and "manner" in the serialization process of motion verbs are discussed in the Turkish context.

Trailing Harry Potter into Romanian

Characteristic of English and other Germanic languages, Goal of Motion constructions represent a challenge for any translator rendering them into a Romance language. This is because to express the motion of an entity to/towards a Goal in a particular manner, English typically combines a manner-of-motion verb or a verb of sound emission with a dynamic preposition like into in He ran into the park. However, the combination is not generally available in Romanian and other Romance languages, since they not only lack dynamic prepositions, but also have far fewer manner-of-motion verbs. Consequently, to render Goal of Motion into Romanian with as little loss as possible, a translator will have to resort to various translation techniques to compensate not only for the lack of dynamic prepositions in this language, but also for its far poorer class of manner-of-motion verbs. This paper proposes several strategies for the translation of Goal of Motion constructions into Romanian and shows that they depend on the lexical and syntactic resources available in this language. An analysis of the techniques employed in a selected sample from two Romanian translations of the Harry Potter series indicates that the translators' strategies generally mirror Talmy's (1985, 2000) typological classification of Germanic and Romance languages into satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, respectively.

The influence of language-specific and universal factors on acquisition of motion verbs

This study explores children’s encoding of novel verbs referring to motion events, and finds influence of both language-specific and universal constraints on meaning. Motion verbs fall into two categories—manner verbs encode how a movement happens (run, swim), and path verbs encode the starting and ending point of a motion (enter, fall). Some languages express path more frequently in the verb (Spanish, Hebrew), and others manner more frequently (English, German). Our study expands on this previous work demonstrating sensitivity to these language-specific distributions, as well as expanding to test environmental factors representing a predictable universal distribution. We find that children are sensitive to both the language-specific factors as well as the universal factors in motion verb acquisition.

A new case of low modality: Goal PPs*

This paper provides experimental evidence from German and English against the view that a goal to/zu-PP in combination with a motion verb designates a goal that is reached. We propose that to/zu have a modal meaning, responsible for the defeasibility of the inference that the goal is reached. We argue that the type of subjects (intentional agent vs. accidental agent or theme) determines the flavor of the (necessity) modal encoded by the preposition (teleological or circumstantial), which allows us to account for the observed variation in the strength of the inference with the type of subjects and the type of verbs.

The рrospective in Spanish: Forms, semantics, pragmatics (part 1)

Based on corpus data, the article discusses three Spanish infinitive constructions with a prospective meaning: two constructions with the verb of location estar and one with the verb of movement ir: </estar a punto de + inf.>, </estar por + inf.> and </ir a + inf.>. A new approach is applied that views these constructions as a means of expressing the grammeme of the prospective in Spanish. The first part of the article contains an overview of the results of a corpus study of all three constructions which aims to clarify both diachronic and synchronic issues of the simultaneous functioning of three different means of expressing prospective semantics, their frequency, as well as the distribution of each construction in the Spanishspeaking area. The first part also offers a detailed comparative analysis of the semantics of two infinitive constructions with estar. It begins with the establishment of a characteristic restriction for both constructions on filling the infinitive slot with atelic lexemes (which makes them different from the construction with the motion verb) and ends with proposed interpretations of the semantics of both constructions with the verb of location. In the second part of the work, based on a review of descriptive grammars, theories, and corpus research, the prospective construction with the verb of movement ir is discussed, and (based on the results of a corpus study of all three constructions) a description of the prospective zone in Spanish is proposed from the position of general, i. e., typologically oriented, morphology and grammatical semantics.

Codificación del movimiento por aprendices checos de españo: influencia de los patrones de pensar para hablar de la L1 en la L2

Motion encoding by Czech learners of Spanish: Influence of L1 Thinking-for-Speaking patterns in L2 This paper studies verbal encoding of motion events by Czech advanced learners of Spanish and Spanish native speakers. Since these languages differ in terms of Talmy’s (2000) typology of motion encoding, the study aims to assess to what extent the learners acquired the Thinking-for-Speaking patterns (Slobin 1996) of the L2. To this end, written narratives by natives and learners are examined and compared. The results show that the construction “path verb + manner complement”, a typical structure for verb-framed languages such as Spanish, is used significantly less often by the learners compared with the natives. The results also indicate that L1 interference happens when expressing boundary crossing situations in Spanish by the learners, since they tend to use a Manner of motion verb.

Constructions with the verb EITI ‘to go’ in the 16th century Lithuanian writings

This research investigates the semantics and the structure of the constructions with the verb eiti ‘to go’ extracted from the old Lithuanian written texts, dating back to the 16th century. It aims to examine the meanings and the structure of the constructions that contain the motion verb eiti ‘to go’ within their structure. There is a considerable body of research investigating various aspects of motion verbs in different languages of the world, including Lithuanian. However, no studies have so far targeted constructions with the verb eiti ‘to go’, found in the 16th century Lithuanian writings. The present study is based on the qualitative content analysis, quantitative analysis, and frame semantics methodology. The concordances of the Lithuanian texts have been filtered out from the Database of Old Writings digitalised by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. The examples were taken from Martynas Mažvydas’ Katekizmas (MžK) and Forma krikštymo (MžF), Jonas Bretkūnas’ Biblija (BB), Giesmės Duchaunos (BG), Kancionalas (BKa) and Kolektos (BKo), Mikalojus Daukša’s Katekizmas (DK) and Postilė (DP).The frames of Motion, State, Law, Eternity, Service, Opposition, Law, etc., evoked by the selected constructions, were examined using the frame semantics (FrameNet Project). The research has shown that the current constructions with the motion verb eiti ‘to go’ can form the core of the mentioned frames. The observation that has emerged from this analysis is that some meanings of the analysed constructions are conserved in the current Lithuanian language while others have already disappeared. This work could be useful for historical linguists.

From verb to New Event Marker

In Hittite, deictic motion verbs pai- ‘go’ and uwa- ‘come’ may co-occur in a monoclausal structure with a second verb that carries the lexical meaning. As yet, their exact function remains obscure. I argue that motion verbs involved in such construction underwent transcategorization and function as New Event Markers. I show that this development is best explained as an instance of constructionalization involving both the motion verbs and the second verb in the clause, which is based on a pragmatic inference arising when motion verbs were used without a spatial complement. Either motion verb contributes a different semantics to the construction based on the different perspective regarding the deictic center identified by the ego, whereby pai- ‘go’ (motion originating from the deictic center) marks an event as close in time and controlled, while uwa- ‘come’ (motion originating outside the deictic center) indicates distance in time and possible lack of control.

On the History of the English Progressive Construction Jane came whistling down the street

This article examines the historical development of the VV ingOBL construction, as exemplified by “Jane came whistling down the street” or “She went walking up the field path,” where an intransitive motion verb is followed by a present participle and an oblique complement. The analysis looks at the precursors of the construction since Old English and argues that the sharp rise in productivity of the VV ingOBL construction, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century, is interrelated with changes affecting English motion vocabulary in Early and Late Modern English and also the increase in frequency of the be progressive over the same period. By the twentieth century, the VV ingOBL construction had settled into its modern form, namely a deictic-directional construction with either come or go in the V slot. The article also considers indices of the advancing grammaticalization of the construction. It concludes by discussing whether its morphosyntactic and semantic properties support considering it as a serial verb construction, a hypothesis briefly raised in work by Goldberg (2006:52).