Thinking for translating and intra-typological variation in satellite-framed languages

We analyze the expression of motion in translations of Tolkien’s The Hobbit into Polish and German within the framework of Talmy’s (1991, 2000) typology of macro-events and Slobin’s (1991, 1996) “Thinking for speaking” hypothesis. We show that although both languages pertain to the satellite-framed typological group, Polish provides less diversified Manner and Path descriptions than German, which exploits the satellite-framed lexicalization pattern by far more productively. We relate these contrasts in the rhetorical style to the particular morpho-syntactic and semantic characteristics of the languages under discussion.