Volume 69, Issue 3 -

This paper discusses Talmy’s typology of motion events and provides an outline of our own approach. In the first part, we present Talmy’s typology, its origin and evolution, the various objections which have been raised against it, and some data which, in current typological work, have been recognized marginally or not at all. In the second part, we describe our own approach, with a double goal in sight: first, of overcoming the difficulties met by current proposals, and, next, of providing an inventory of constructions used in the encoding of path. This inventory is given in an appendix.

Communicating about spatial relations is a day-to-day task throughout our life. We accomplish it so spontaneously and easily that it was thought for long that our own way of transmitting spatial information was universal. However, when anthropologists and linguists started to carry on detailed studies on ‘exotic’ cultures, they found that the verbal expression of even basic spatial relations may differ significantly from language to language. This article contributes to this line of research and focuses on the local factors, notably cultural and geographic, which interfere with the linguistic expression and the precise transmission of spatial information in a few Arabic and Dravidian languages.

This paper attempts to assess motion events in Ilami Kurdish through Talmy’s binary typology (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and lexical descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon , 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000a. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 1: Concept structuring system . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000b. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 2: Typology and process in concept structuring . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) according to which, languages could be classified as “Satellite-framed” or “Verb-framed”. Following Berman and Slobin’s approach (1994. Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) in using “The Frog Story”, which paved the way for evaluating numerous languages in terms of their motion verbs, we used this elicitation tool for gathering Kurdish data. Results reveal that Ilami tends towards Satellite-framed languages as the concept of Path is often expressed by the use of satellites. As far as analysis of Path in Kurdish is taken into account, this concept has been analyzed with the help of different criteria proposed by Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008. Path salience in motion events. In Jiansheng Gu, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin Tripp, Keiko Nakamura & Şeyda Özçalışkan (eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin , 403–414. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and typologically compared with other languages too. It seems that in addition to the oral nature of Ilami and its contact with Persian language, “the syntactic sensitivity of satellites” as a new motivation, also affects the amount of details accompanying the Path concept in this dialect.

This paper presents a qualitative linguistic analysis of data from bi- and multilingual persons who grew up in the German-Danish border region. The present paper will present language practices on social network sites and compare them to informal oral data from the same groups of bi- and multilingual friends. The core part of this article presents a subset of the written and oral data, i. e. a case study of two micro-groups of on- and off-line friends whose linguistic practices index a specific stand towards the macro community (two autochthone national minority groups) to which the speakers/writers belong.