The encoding of motion events

This chapter investigates eleven fundamental questions of motion event encoding from a massively cross-linguistic (i.e. typological) perspective in a bottom-up approach in parallel and original texts making use of quantitative and qualitative methods and various visualization methods. It is found that motion events can be encoded by lexical and grammatical means, by words and morphemes and tend to be expressed by constructions rather than simple markers (distributional spatial semantics). It is argued that local decomposition is more appropriate to address the semantics of motion events than global decomposition and that motion event typology consists of continuous rather than discrete variables. In motion event typology there are many features with only weak correlations (high heterogeneity). Both universal and culture-dependent aspects of motion event encoding are identified and areal trends in motion event typology are addressed (notably the deviant behavior of the North American continent).