Disentangling manner and path

The standard theory of lexicalization patterns in the encoding of motion events (STLP in the remainder of this chapter; cf. Talmy 1985; Slobin 1996b; Talmy 2000, 2009) has been used in such a great number of research projects in the past two decades that makes its extensive introduction superfluous. However, in this contribution I argue that that some of the claims of ‘mainstream’ STLP research are problematic, both from an empirical and from a theoretical point of view. Instead of discussing the fundamentals of the theory, I focus directly on the aspect of the approach particularly relevant to this chapter, namely the causal relationships that are presupposed between the expression of two semantic domains, the domain of manner (of motion) and the domain of path.