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Part of
The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296] 2018
► pp. 45–74

A typological approach to the encoding of motion events

| University of Copenhagen, Denmark

This study reports on findings from an elicited narrative task in which native speakers of three genetically different languages, German, Polish, and Spanish, were asked to describe motion scenes from an extract of Chaplin’s City Lights. The results show that linguistic typology has an important predictive power as far as narrative style is concerned; however, since typological generalizations usually refer to tendencies rather than sharp divisions between languages, it is crucial to pay attention to the specific resources of a given language available for describing a particular conceptual domain. Specifically, although German and Polish pertain to the same typological group (satellite-framed), as opposed to Spanish (verb-framed), they exploit their predominant lexicalization pattern in a different way, and this has an enormous impact on the narrative style.

Keywords: narrative style, motion, path, manner, German, Polish, Spanish, satellite-framed, verb-framed, intra-typological variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1 Talmy’s (1991, 2000) typology of motion events
    • 2.2 Slobin’s (1991, 1996) “Thinking for speaking” hypothesis
    • 2.3Inter- and intra-typological variation in the expression of motion
  • 3.The present study
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Results and discussion
      • 3.2.1The expression of path
        • 3.2.1.1Inter-typological variation
        • 3.2.1.2Intra-typological variation
      • 3.2.2The expression of manner
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.03lew
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