Grammaticalization and innovation in the encoding of motion events
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Claudio Iacobini
The way in which major Romance languages prefer to encode motion events corresponds, in Talmy’s terminology, to the Verb-framed type. Latin is classified as a Satellite-framed language, and hence the diachronic transition from Latin to Romance involves a typological change. This change has been reconstructed by Herslund (2005) as a chain of processes ordered on a three-stage evolutionary scale, from a low to a high level of grammaticalization. Current Romance languages are located at different positions on this scale, French being the only one to have reached the third stage. The article discusses Herslund’s proposal on the ordering of Romance languages, arguing that both cross-linguistic comparisons of motion typology and the reasons for typological change should be considered at the level of particular linguistic constructions or that of particular event types, rather than as part of the language as a whole.
© 2012 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Introduction: The pace of grammaticalization in a typological perspective
- The pace of grammaticalization and the evolution of prepositional systems: Data from Romance
- Grammaticalisation and the internal logic of the indefinite article
- Grammaticalization and innovation in the encoding of motion events
- Word order in French, Spanish and Italian:A grammaticalization account
- Degrees of grammaticalization in three Romance languages: A comparative analysis of existential constructions
- The evolution of negation in French and Italian: Similarities and differences
- Gradualness and pace in grammaticalization: The case of adversative connectives
- Stages of grammaticalization of causative verbs and constructions in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian
- A comparative study of word order in Old Romance
- Possessives and grammaticalization in Romance
- Acknowledgements
- Conference report
- Index to volume 46
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Introduction: The pace of grammaticalization in a typological perspective
- The pace of grammaticalization and the evolution of prepositional systems: Data from Romance
- Grammaticalisation and the internal logic of the indefinite article
- Grammaticalization and innovation in the encoding of motion events
- Word order in French, Spanish and Italian:A grammaticalization account
- Degrees of grammaticalization in three Romance languages: A comparative analysis of existential constructions
- The evolution of negation in French and Italian: Similarities and differences
- Gradualness and pace in grammaticalization: The case of adversative connectives
- Stages of grammaticalization of causative verbs and constructions in Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian
- A comparative study of word order in Old Romance
- Possessives and grammaticalization in Romance
- Acknowledgements
- Conference report
- Index to volume 46
