Grammaticalization and innovation in the encoding of motion events

Claudio Iacobini

doi:10.1515/flin.2012.013

Article

Grammaticalization and innovation in the encoding of motion events

Claudio Iacobini

Published/Copyright: October 31, 2012

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From the journal Folia Linguistica Volume 46 Issue 2

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.

Keywords:: Grammaticalization; Romance languages; motion events; linguistic change; typological classification.

Published Online: 2012-10-31

Published in Print: 2012-10

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2012.013

Keywords for this article

Grammaticalization; Romance languages; motion events; linguistic change; typological classification.