In:Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar
Edited by Hans C. Boas and Francisco Gonzálvez-García
[Constructional Approaches to Language 15] 2014
► pp. 269–304
Chapter 8. Variable type framing in Spanish constructions of directed motion
Published online: 28 August 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.15.08ped
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.15.08ped
Spanish constructions of telic motion with manner verbs are somewhat problematic for the Talmian typology, while also posing a challenge for constructionist frameworks anchored in English grammar. In response to Talmy (2000), Aske (1989), Morimoto (2008), and Beavers et al. (2010) among others, I demonstrate in this article that this construction type tends to be acceptable whenever the lexical meaning of the verb implies an element of directed motion. Drawing on Goldberg (2006) and Pedersen (2009, 2013), I suggest that schematicity is a typological parameter, and, more specifically, that the term variable type framing may accommodate the case of variation under scrutiny here.
References (68)
Allen, S., Özyürek, A., Kita, S., Brown, A., Furman, R., Ishizuka, T., & Fuji, M. (2007). Language-specific and universal influence in children’s syntactic packaging of manner and path: A comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish. Cognition, 102, 16–48.
Alonge, A. (1997). Semantica lessicale e proprietà sintattiche dei verbi di movimento italiani: Analisi di dati acquisiti da dizionari di macchina e da un corpus testuale computerizzato. In L. Agostiniani, P. Bonucci, G. Giannecchini, F. Lorenzi, & L. Reali (Eds.), Atti del III convegno della società internazionale di linguistica e filologia italiana (pp. 31–63). Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane: Naples.
Aske, J. (1989). Path predicates in English and Spanish: A closer look.
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
, 1–14.
Baicchi, A. (2005). Translating phrasal combinations across the typological divide. In M. Bertuccelli Papi (Ed.), Studies in the semantics of lexical combinatory patterns (pp. 487–519). Pisa: Pisa University Press.
Beavers, J. (2008). On the nature of goal marking and delimitation: Evidence from Japanese. Journal of Linguistics, 44, 283–316.
Beavers, J., Levin, B., & Shiao Wei, T. (2010). The typology of motion expressions revisited. Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 1–58.
Berman, R.A., & Slobin, D.A. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
. (2010a). Linguistically relevant meaning elements of English communication verbs. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 24, 54–82.
. (2010b). Comparing constructions across languages. In H.C. Boas (Ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar (pp. 1–20). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. (2011). Coercion and leaking argument structures in Construction Grammar. Linguistics, 49(6), 1271–1303.
Bohnemeyer, J., Enfield, N.J., Essegbey, J., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Kita, S., Lüpke, F., & Ameka, F.K. (2007). Principles of event segmentation in language: The case of motion events. Language, 83, 495–532.
Cifuentes Férez, P. (2009). A crosslinguistic study on the semantics of motion verbs in English and Spanish. Munich: Lincom Europa.
. (2010). The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 8(2), 233–271.
Corpus del Español. Retrieved from [URL].
CREA Corpus. Real Academia Española (RAE). Retrieved from [URL].
. (2003). Lexical rules vs. constructions: A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven, & K-U. Panther (Eds.), Motivations in language (pp. 49–68). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Croft, W., Barddal, J., Hollmann, W., Sotirova, V., & Taoka, C. (2010). Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In H.C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in Construction Grammar (pp. 201–236). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fábregas, A. (2007). The exhaustive lexicalisation principle. Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers in Linguistics, 34(2), 165–199.
Feist, M.I., Rojo, A., & Cifuentes, P. (2007). Salience and acceptability in Spanish manner verbs: A preliminary view. International Journal of English studies, 7(1), 137–148.
Fillmore, C.J. 1988. The mechanisms of Construction Grammar.
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society
, 35–55.
Folli, R., & Ramchand, G. (2005). Prepositions and results in Italian and English: An analysis from event decomposition. In H. Verkuyl, H. de Swart, & A. van Hout (Eds.), Perspectives on aspect (pp. 81–105). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Gennari, S.P., Sloman, S.A., Malt, B.A., & Fitch W.T. (2002). Motion events in language and cognition. Cognition, 83, 49–79.
Goldberg, A.E. (1995). Constructions. A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. (1996). Making one’s way through the data. In M. Shibatani, & S. Thompson (Eds.), Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning (pp. 29–53). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2004b). Dicotomías frente a continuos en la lexicalización de los eventos de movimiento [Dichotomies vs. continua in the lexicalization of movement events]. Revista Española de Lingüística, 34(2), 481–510.
Goldberg, A.E., & Jackendoff, R. (2004). The English resultative as a family of constructions. Language, 80, 532–568.
Gonzálvez-García, F. (2009). The family of object-related depictives in English and Spanish: towards a usage-based constructionist analysis. Language Sciences, 31, 663–723.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (2004a). Motion events in Basque narratives. In S. Strömqvist, & Ludo Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 89–111). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
. (2004b). Dicotomías frente a continuos en la lexicalización de los eventos de movimiento [Dichotomies vs. continua in the lexicalization of movement events]. Revista Española de Lingüística, 34(2), 481–510.
. (2005). Leonard Talmy. A windowing to conceptual structure and language: Part 1: Lexicalisation and typology. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 3, 325–347.
Kopecka, A. (2006). The semantic structure of motion verbs in French. Typological perspectives. In M. Hickmann, & S. Robert (Eds.), Space in languages: Linguistic systems and cognitive categories (pp. 83–101). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Langacker, R.W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar (Vol. I.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
. (1988). A usage-based model. In B. Rudzka-Ostyn (Ed.), Topics in cognitive linguistics (pp. 127–161). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levin, B., Beavers, J., & Tham, S.W. (2009). Manner of motion roots across languages: Same or different?Ms., Roots Workshop, Stuttgart, 2009. Retrieved from [URL].
Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (1995). Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martínez Vázquez, M. (2001). Delimited events in English and Spanish. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, 9, 31–59.
Mateu Fontanals, J., & Rigau, G. (2002). A minimalist account of conflation processes: Parametric variation at the lexicon-syntax interface. In D.A. Alexiadou (Ed.), Theoretical approaches to universals (pp. 211–236). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Morimoto, Y. (2008). Grammar of “manner of motion” verbs in English and Spanish: between lexicon and syntax. In N. Delbecque, & B. Cornillie (Eds.), Trends in linguistics, studies and monographs: On interpreting construction schemas: From action and motion to transitivity and causality (pp. 287–305). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Naigles L.R., Eisenberg, A.R., Kako, E.T., Highter, M., & Mcgraw, N. (1998). Speaking of motion. Verb use in English and Spanish. Language and Cognitive Process, 13(5–1), 521–549.
Pedersen, J. (2009a). The construction of macro-events. A typological perspective. In C.S. Butler, & J. Martín Arista (Eds.), Deconstructing constructions (pp. 25–62). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. (2009b). Lexical and constructional organization of argument structure. A contrastive analysis. In J. Zlatev, & M. Andrén (Eds.), Studies in language and cognition (pp. 230–245). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
. (2013). The way-construction and cross-linguistic variation in syntax. Implications for typological theory. In C. Paradis, J. Hudson, & U. Magnusson (Eds.), Conceptual spaces and the construal of spatial meaning (pp. 236–262). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707–784.
Pourcel, S., & Kopecka, A. (2006). Motion events in French: Typological intricacies. Unpublished ms., University of Sussex and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Brighton, UK, and Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F.J., & Mairal Usón, R. (2008). Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction: An introduction to the lexical constructional model. Folia Linguistica, 42(2), 355–400.
Slobin, D.I. (1996). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M. Shibatani, & S.A. Thompson (Eds.), Grammatical constructions: Their form and meaning (pp. 195–219). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. (1997). Mind, code and text. In J. Bybee, J. Haiman, & Sandra Thompson (Eds.), Essays on language function and language type (pp. 437–468). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. (2000). Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism. In S. Niemeier, & R. Dirven (Eds.), Evidence for linguistic relativity (pp. 107–138). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Strömquist, & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological perspectives (pp. 219–257). Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Slobin, D.I., & Hoiting, N. (1994). Reference to movement in spoken and signed languages: Typological considerations.
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society
, 487–505.
Snyder, W. (2001). On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from complex predicates and complex word-formation. Language, 77(2), 324–342.
Son, M. (2007). Directionality and resultativity: The cross-linguistic correlation revisited. Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers in Linguistics, 34(2), 126–164.
Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. Th. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 209–243.
Stringer, D. (2001). The syntax of paths and boundaries. Chicago Linguistic Society Proceedings, 37, 139–153.
. (2003). Acquisitional evidence for a universal syntax of directional PPs. In P. Saint-Dizier (Ed.), Proceedings of the ACL-SIGSEM workshop on the linguistic dimensions of prepositions and their use in computational linguistics formalisms and applications (pp. 44–55). Toulouse: IRIT.
Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (vol. 3): Grammatical categories and the lexicon (pp. 57–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event conflation.
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Berkeley Linguistics Society
, 480–519.
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Wiesinger, Evelyn
Wiesinger, Evelyn
2021. The Spanish verb-particle construction [V para atrás]. In Constructions in Contact 2 [Constructional Approaches to Language, 30], ► pp. 139 ff.
Pedersen, Johan
2016. Spanish constructions of directed motion – a quantitative study. In Corpus-based Approaches to Construction Grammar [Constructional Approaches to Language, 19], ► pp. 105 ff.
Pedersen, Johan
Donoso, Alejandra & Emanuel Bylund
2015. The Construal of Goal-Oriented Motion Events by Swedish Speakers of L2 Spanish. In The Acquisition of Spanish in Understudied Language Pairings [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 3], ► pp. 233 ff.
Lewandowski, Wojciech
2014. The locative alternation in verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages. Studies in Language 38:4 ► pp. 864 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
