Chapter 9. Motion events in Polish

This chapter investigates the expression of motion events in Polish (a satellite-framed language) and examines the semantic granularity of Manner in the descriptions of motion in written prose. It shows that despite its typological similarity to English in encoding Manner in the main verb and Path in a satellite Polish does not exploit its satellite-framed pattern as productively as English. The types of fine-grained Manner components that Polish lexicalizes in the verb (e.g., velocity, motor pattern, attitude, etc.) are less diverse than those found in English (cf., Slobin 2004a, 2004b, 2006) and the lexical repertoire of Manner verbs is smaller. Furthermore, although many Manner verbs can combine freely with Path satellites, and occur in directed motion constructions, for some of them such combinations are much more restricted. Therefore, to elaborate the expression of Manner, Polish relies heavily on modifying expressions and tend to distribute Manner information across the sentence between the main verb and a subordinate clause or some adverbial expression.