Motion Event Constructions in Swedish, French and Thai: Three Different Language Types?

Abstract

Talmyʼs influential typology of verb-framed/satellite-framed languages has recently been shown to be insufficient (Strömquist and Verhoeven 2003), in particular with respect of serial-verb languages (Zlatev and Yangklang 2004; Slobin 2003). In this paper, we compare motion event constructions in three languages, where two are clear representatives of Talmyʼs two types: French and Swedish, and the third is a serial-verb language, Thai. As expected, Thai turns out to resemble French in some respects, Swedish in others but also to possess structural (i.e. syntactic and semantic) characteristics which distinguish it from the two Talmian types. This reinforces, but also clarifies, previous proposals for regarding serial-verb languages as belonging to a third “equipollent” type.