Within-type variation in Satellite-framed languages: The case of Serbian

Abstract

Abstract After a wealth of studies on motion event descriptions, it seems hard to say something new: the Verb-framed/Satellite-framed typology proposed by Talmy has spawned a long debate. Among other things, previous work has shown within-type variation for one of the two language types defined by Talmy, namely Verb-framed languages. In this paper, we address this debate, showing within-type variation for the other type, Satellite-framed languages, with new data elicited from native speakers of Serbian. In order to do so, we compare it with five other languages, from three Indo-European language families (Romance, Germanic and Slavic). Our data show that Serbian is a particularly interesting case, since it is structurally Satellite-framed, but behaves like Verb-framed languages in that speakers do not always express manner and path jointly (i.e. manner in the verb and path in the satellite), as expected on the basis of Talmy’s typology. The main result of our paper is thus that there is a good deal of within-type variation for both language types identified by Talmy.