John Benjamins Publishing Company
The encoding of motion events
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Bernhard Wälchli
Abstract
This chapter investigates eleven fundamental questions of motion event encoding from a massively cross-linguistic (i.e. typological) perspective in a bottom-up approach in parallel and original texts making use of quantitative and qualitative methods and various visualization methods. It is found that motion events can be encoded by lexical and grammatical means, by words and morphemes and tend to be expressed by constructions rather than simple markers (distributional spatial semantics). It is argued that local decomposition is more appropriate to address the semantics of motion events than global decomposition and that motion event typology consists of continuous rather than discrete variables. In motion event typology there are many features with only weak correlations (high heterogeneity). Both universal and culture-dependent aspects of motion event encoding are identified and areal trends in motion event typology are addressed (notably the deviant behavior of the North American continent).
Abstract
This chapter investigates eleven fundamental questions of motion event encoding from a massively cross-linguistic (i.e. typological) perspective in a bottom-up approach in parallel and original texts making use of quantitative and qualitative methods and various visualization methods. It is found that motion events can be encoded by lexical and grammatical means, by words and morphemes and tend to be expressed by constructions rather than simple markers (distributional spatial semantics). It is argued that local decomposition is more appropriate to address the semantics of motion events than global decomposition and that motion event typology consists of continuous rather than discrete variables. In motion event typology there are many features with only weak correlations (high heterogeneity). Both universal and culture-dependent aspects of motion event encoding are identified and areal trends in motion event typology are addressed (notably the deviant behavior of the North American continent).
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Editors and contributors vii
- Preface ix
- Introduction: Beyond typology 1
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Part I. Variation
- Typology as a continuum 17
- Same family, different paths 39
- Disentangling manner and path 55
- The encoding of motion events 77
- Motion events in Turkish-German contact varieties 115
- Variation in the categorization of motion events by Danish, German, Turkish, and L2 Danish speakers 133
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Part II. Change
- Describing motion events in Old and Modern French 163
- Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek 185
- Caused-motion verbs in the Middle English intransitive motion construction 203
- Variation and change in English path verbs and constructions: Usage patterns and conceptual structure 223
- Author index 245
- Language index 247
- Subject index 249
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Editors and contributors vii
- Preface ix
- Introduction: Beyond typology 1
-
Part I. Variation
- Typology as a continuum 17
- Same family, different paths 39
- Disentangling manner and path 55
- The encoding of motion events 77
- Motion events in Turkish-German contact varieties 115
- Variation in the categorization of motion events by Danish, German, Turkish, and L2 Danish speakers 133
-
Part II. Change
- Describing motion events in Old and Modern French 163
- Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek 185
- Caused-motion verbs in the Middle English intransitive motion construction 203
- Variation and change in English path verbs and constructions: Usage patterns and conceptual structure 223
- Author index 245
- Language index 247
- Subject index 249
