Should Talmy’s motion typology be expanded to visual motion?

An investigation into expressions of motion, agentive motion, and visual motion in Sidaama (Sidamo)

Kazuhiro Kawachi | National Defense Academy of Japan

This chapter addresses the question of whether or not Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000b) motion typology should be expanded to visual motion (Matsumoto 2001, 2017; Slobin 2009; Cifuentes-Férez 2014), by examining how Sidaama (Cushitic; Ethiopia) expresses (i) self-agentive/non-agentive motion, (ii) agentive motion, and (iii) fictive motion along a visual emanation path. It shows that although this language closely follows the verb-framed pattern in expressing (i) and (ii), it does not do so in expressing (iii), as in many other verb-framed languages. A possible reason for this is that (iii) is not conceptualized as a macro-event, whereas Talmy’s typology is built on expression patterns of macro-events. This study also observes that there are other types of events to which Talmy’s typology does not apply, presumably for the same reason: they are not really macro-events.

Keywords: fictive motion, macro-event, verb-framed language, visual emanation

Published online: 11 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.69.07kaw

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