Cover not available

Article published In: Diachronica
Vol. 32:1 (2015) ► pp.69–72

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF

Where do all the motion verbs come from?

The speed of development of manner verbs and path verbs in Indo-European

 | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Reading Evolutionary Biology Group
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 30 March 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.32.1.03ver
The last four decades have seen huge progress in the description and analysis of cross-linguistic diversity in the encoding of motion (Talmy 1985, 1991, Slobin 1996, 2004). Comparisons between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages suggest that satellite-framed languages typically have a larger manner of motion verb lexicon (swim, dash), while verb-framed languages typically have a larger path of motion verb lexicon (enter, cross) (Slobin 2004, Verkerk 2013, 2014b). This paper investigates how differences between the motion verb lexicons of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages emerge. Phylogenetic comparative methods adopted from biology and an etymological study are used to investigate manner verb lexicons and path verb lexicons in an Indo-European dataset. I show that manner verbs and path verbs typically have different types of etymological origins and that manner verbs emerge faster in satellite-framed subgroups, while path verbs emerge faster in verb-framed subgroups.
References (59)
Adams, James Noel. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Algeo, John. 1980. Where do all the new words come from? American Speech 551. 264–277. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aske, Jon. 1989. Path predicates in English and Spanish: A closer look. In Kira Hall, Michael Meacham & Richard Shapiro (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 1–14.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berman, Ruth A. & Dan I. Slobin (eds.). 1994. Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard & Quentin D. Atkinson. 2012. Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science 3371. 957–960. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Cecil H. 1983. Where do cardinal direction terms come from? Anthropological Linguistics 25(2). 121–161.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cannon, Garland. 1978. Statistical etymologies of new words in American English. Journal of English Linguistics 121. 12–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cifuentes Férez, Paula. 2010. The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 81. 233–271. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clackson, James. 2007. Indo-European linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delbrück, Berthold. 1888. Altindische syntax. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1893. Vergleichende Syntax der indogermanischen Sprachen. Strasbourg: K.J. Trübner. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Derksen, Rick. 2008. Etymological dictionary of the Slavic inherited lexicon. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dickey, Stephen M. 2010. Common Slavic “indeterminate” verbs of motion were really manner-of-motion verbs. In Victoria Hasko & Renee Perelmutter (eds.), New approaches to Slavic verbs of motion, 67–109. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dizionari sapere.it. 2012. Dizionari di Lingua Italiana. Novara, Italy: De Agostini Editore.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Drummond, Alexei J., Marc A. Suchard, Dong Xie & Andrew Rambaut. 2012. Bayesian phylogenetics with BEAUti and the BEAST 1.7. Molecular Biology and Evolution 29(8). 1969–1973. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson & Russell D. Gray. 2011. Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature 4731. 79–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunn, Michael, Kate Bellamy, Chundra Cathcart, Andrew Garrett, Julia Ludewig & Cornelia van Scherpenberg. Forthcoming. IELex: An Indo-European lexical database for phylogenetic analysis. PloS One.
Dyen, Isodore, Joseph B. Kruskal & Paul Black. 1992. An Indo-European classification: A lexicostatistical experiment. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82(1). iii–132. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fanego, Teresa. 2012. Motion events in English: The emergence and diachrony of manner salience from Old English to Late Modern English. Folia Linguistica Historica 331. 29–85.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Green, Peter J. 1995. Reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo computation and Bayesian model determination. Biometrika 82(4). 711–732. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greenberg, Marc L. 2010. PIE inheritance and word-formational innovation in Slavic motion verbs in -i-. In Victoria Hasko & Renee Perelmutter (eds.), New approaches to Slavic verbs of motion, 111–121. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hickmann, Maya, Henriëtte Hendriks, Efstathia Soroli, Tatiana Iakovleva & Yinglin Ji. Forthcoming. Space and language typology: Encoding motion across languages.
Hofmann, Johann B. & Anton Szantyr. 1965. Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik. Munich: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huelsenbeck, John P., Fredrik Ronquist, Rasmus Nielsen & Jonathan P. Bollback. 2001. Bayesian inference of phylogeny and its impact on evolutionary biology. Science 2941. 2310–2314. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2004. Motion events in Basque narratives. In Sven Strömqvist & Ludo Verhoven (eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives, 89–111. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kass, Robert E. & Adrian E. Raftery. 1995. Bayes factors. Journal of the American Statistical Association 90(430). 773–795. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lehmann, Winfred P. 1974. Proto-Indo-European syntax. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Machado, José Pedro. 1952. Dicionário etimológico da língua portuguesa. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nakhleh, Luay, Don Ringe & Tandy Warnow. 2005. Perfect phylogenetic networks: A new methodology for reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages. Language 81(2). 382–420. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nicolas, Christian. 2005. Sic enim appello...: essau sur l’autonymie terminologique gréco-latine chez Cicéron. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Orel, Vladimir E. 1998. Albanian etymological dictionary. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Özçalışkan, Şeyda & Dan I. Slobin. 2003. Codability effects on the expression of manner of motion in English and Turkish. In Sumru Özsoy, Didar Akar, Mine Nakipoğlu-Demiralp, Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan & Ayhan Aksu-Koç (eds.), Studies in Turkish linguistics: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, 259–270. Istanbul: Bogazici University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pagel, Mark. 1997. Inferring evolutionary processes from phylogenies. Zoologica Scriptica 261. 331–348. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999. Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution. Nature 4011. 877–884. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pagel, Mark, Andrew Meade & Daniel Barker. 2004. Bayesian estimation of ancestral character states on phylogenies. Systematic Biology 53(5). 673–684. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow & Ann Taylor. 2002. Indo-European and computational cladistics. Transactions of the Philological Society 1001. 59–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmitt, Rüdiger. 1981. Grammatik des Klassisch-Armenischen mit sprachvergleichenden Erläuterungen. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slobin, Dan I. 1996. Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In Masayoshi Shibitani & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Their form and meaning, 195–219. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. Mind, code, and text. In Joan Bybee, John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Essays on language function and language type: Dedicated to T. Givón, 437–467. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In Sven Strömqvist & Ludo Verhoven (eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives, 219–257. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. Relating narrative events in translation. In Dorit Diskin Ravid & Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (eds.), Perspectives on language and language development: Essays in honor of Ruth A. Berman, 115–129. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 57–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1991. Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. In Christopher Johnson, Laurel A. Sutton & Ruth Shields (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 480–519. Berkeley: University of California.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, Ralph Lilley. 1962-1985. A comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Uhlenbeck, Christiaan Cornelis. 1899. Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch der altindischen Sprache. Amsterdam: Müller.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vaan, Michiel de. 2008. Etymological dictionary of Latin and the other Italic languages. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Venditti, Chris, Andrew Meade & Mark Pagel. 2011. Multiple routes to mammalian diversity. Nature 4791. 393–396. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Verkerk, Annemarie. 2013. Scramble, scurry and dash: The correlation between motion event encoding and manner verb lexicon size in Indo-European. Language Dynamics and Change 3(2): 169–217. Special issue, “Phylogeny and beyond: Quantitative diachronic approaches to language diversity”, edited by Michael Dunn. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014a. Diachronic change in motion event encoding. Journal of Historical Linguistics 4(1). 40–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014b. The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in Indo-European. Folia Linguistica Historica 351. 307–358.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014c. Where Alice fell into: Motion events in a parallel corpus. In Benedikt Szmrecsanyi & Bernhard Wälchli (eds.), Aggregating dialectology, typology, and register analysis: Linguistic variation in text and speech, 324–354. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vidaković, Ivana. 2012. He walked up the pole with arms and legs: Typology in second language acquisition. In Luna Filipović & Kasia M. Jaszczolt (eds.), Space and time in languages and cultures: Linguistic diversity, 233–262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vries, Jan de. 1971. Nederlands etymologisch woordenboek. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wälchli, Bernhard. 2009. Motion events in parallel texts: A study in primary-data typology. Bern: Universität Bern Habilitationsschrift.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wartburg, Walther von. 1922-2003. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bonn: Klopp.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Witkowski, Stanley R., Cecil H. Brown & Paul K. Chase. 1981. Where do tree terms come from? Man 16(1). 1–14. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (17)

Cited by 17 other publications

Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader, Sameerah Saeed & Bashayer Alotaibi
2025. Rooted Motion Events in a Distributed Model of the Arabic Lexicon. Studia Linguistica 79:3 ► pp. 540 ff. DOI logo
Pedro, Pedro Mateo
2024. The acquisition of directionals in Q’anjob’al. First Language 44:6 ► pp. 629 ff. DOI logo
Aktan-Erciyes, Aslı, Emir Akbuğa, Feyza Nur Dik & Tilbe Göksun
2022. Linguistic and nonlinguistic evaluation of motion events in a path-focused language. Applied Psycholinguistics 43:4 ► pp. 829 ff. DOI logo
Moran, Steven, Eitan Grossman & Annemarie Verkerk
2021. Investigating diachronic trends in phonological inventories using BDPROTO. Language Resources and Evaluation 55:1 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Łozińska, Joanna
2021. The poverty of manner categories in motion verbs coding vertical relations. Evidence from Polish and Russian. Russian Linguistics 45:1 ► pp. 93 ff. DOI logo
Anastasio, Simona & Sandra Benazzo
2020. L’expression du déplacement en italien et français L2 : influence translinguistique vs tendances communes. Discours :26 DOI logo
Lewandowski, Wojciech & Jaume Mateu
2020. Motion events again: Delimiting constructional patterns. Lingua 247 ► pp. 102956 ff. DOI logo
Thompson, Bill, Seán G. Roberts & Gary Lupyan
2020. Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment. Nature Human Behaviour 4:10 ► pp. 1029 ff. DOI logo
Soroli, Efstathia, Maya Hickmann & Henriëtte Hendriks
2019. Casting an eye on motion events. In The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French [Human Cognitive Processing, 66], ► pp. 250 ff. DOI logo
Shi, Wenlei, Wanglong Yang & Henghua Su
2018. The typological change of motion expressions in Chinese revisited. Studies in Language 42:4 ► pp. 847 ff. DOI logo
Łozińska, Joanna & Barbara Pietrewicz
2018. Lexicalisation of vertical motion: A study of three satellite-framed languages. Cognitive Studies | Études cognitives :18 DOI logo
Egan, Thomas & Hildegunn Dirdal
2017. Lexis in contrast today. In Cross-linguistic Correspondences [Studies in Language Companion Series, 191], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Huber, Judith
2017. The early life of borrowed path verbs in English. In Motion and Space across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 59], ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide
2017. Motion and semantic typology. In Motion and Space across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 59], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Slobin, Dan I.
2017. Typologies and language use. In Motion and Space across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 59], ► pp. 419 ff. DOI logo
Egan, Thomas
2015. Manner and Path: evidence from a multilingual corpus. CogniTextes 12:Volume 12 DOI logo
Egan, Thomas
2019. Non-representativeness in corpora: perils, pitfalls and challenges. CogniTextes 19:Volume 19 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue