Linguistic and non-linguistic investigation of motion events

Abstract

The verb-framed vs. satellite-framed language dichotomy (Talmy, 1985) is the most common framework used in the crosslinguistic investigation of motion event expressions. According to the classification, French is a verb-framed language, it integrates the path of motion into the main verb and uses a separate component to express the manner of motion. On the other hand, English, a satellite-framed language, gives the manner information in the main verb and expresses the path of motion with a separate component. The present study uses this dichotomy to see whether the motion event expressions patterns of these two typologically different languages (French and English) are also reflected in their motion event categorisations or not.