Camino, Base y Manera en español y sueco

This study surveys how Spanish and Swedish speakers convey information about Motion. The point of departure is the typological description about satellite-framed languages (SFL) and verb-framed languages (VFL) which claims that these language groups differ in how they codify Path and Manner. The data consist of 16 oral narratives in Swedish (SFL) and 16 in Spanish (VFL). Based on the assumption that the lexicalization patterns for motion encoding module how speakers of different languages convey information in discourse (Talmy, 2000; Slobin, 1996a), we hypothesize that the Swedes will offer a wider range of descriptions concerning Manner and Path than the Spanish speakers, whereas the latter group will exhibit high-grained descriptions about the Ground or settings where the action takes place. The first hypothesis is confirmed, the second is partially rejected: both groups offer detailed Ground descriptions, though the Swedes express to a greater extent the final destination of motion events. Even more, our findings suggest that the encoding of end states of motion is highly tied to the use of various satellites, which can be combined both with verbs that express a direction and with verbs which do not involve such information. The characteristic syntactic patterns found in satellite-framed languages for information encoding plus the existence of schematic constructions in Swedish might be an explanation for these results.