Talking about Motion

“This book contains original and insightful corpus-based research into motion expressions in several languages. It convincingly demonstrates the interplay of universal and specific perspectives on the ways that motion events in different situation types are rendered into linguistic expressions by means of lexicalization.”

“Filipović presents a carefully reasoned and well-documented addition to the growing literature on lexicalization patterns in the domain of motion events. She examines a range of data from two languages that have been classed together as “satellite-framed”: Serbo-Croatian and English. The data range from dictionaries to corpora to literary texts to experiments. Filipovic goes beyond lexicalization patterns to analyze situation types as they are expressed in combinations of lexicon, morphology, and syntax. A major addition is her attention to temporal dimensions of events; thus far relatively neglected in this research area. She proposes two broad algorithms for contrastive typology, providing language-specific combinatorial possibilities for relations between verb form, lexical choice, and situation type.The book is full of valuable data, with illuminating additional examples from several well-chosen languages in addition to Serbo-Croatian and English. This multilevel, theory-driven, usage based study will have implications both for further development of theory and for second-language acquisition.”

“This well-written book offers an exciting corpus analysis of the lexicalization patterns of motion events in two typologically related languages, English and Serbo-Croation, and sketches how these two languages differs from one another under sentence-level morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis. In doing so the book provides new challenging findings to the motion of event typology. The book gives and discusses hundreds of data in English and Serbo-Croation; thus, it can be used as a reference book. ...I highly recommend this book to those who explore the language of motion events not only in English and Serbo-Croation but also across languages.”

“Important both for its insightful analysis of Serbo-Croatian in relation to English and for the role of situation types in establishing a typology in general.”

“In this book Luna Filipovic presents a very interesting and well-written study. The detailed presentation of the motion verb system in a Slavonic language and the placing of Serbo-Croatian between Romance and Germanic languages in a continuum of verb- and satellite-framed languages is an important contribution to the typology of European languages, even if it is obvious after the publication of Levinson and Wilkins (2006) that Talmy's typology does not apply to a worldwide sample of languages. The book provides a more fine-grained analysis of the lexicalization patterns than those found in many of the earlier studies of motion verbs in European languages. The demonstration that the importance of the linguistic levels is radically different in English and Serbo-Croatian is very clear and represents an original perspective on the contrastive comparison of two languages.”