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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 32:1 (2015) ► pp.69–72

Where do all the motion verbs come from?

The speed of development of manner verbs and path verbs in Indo-European

| Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Reading Evolutionary Biology Group
The last four decades have seen huge progress in the description and analysis of cross-linguistic diversity in the encoding of motion (Talmy 1985, 1991, Slobin 1996, 2004). Comparisons between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages suggest that satellite-framed languages typically have a larger manner of motion verb lexicon (swim, dash), while verb-framed languages typically have a larger path of motion verb lexicon (enter, cross) (Slobin 2004, Verkerk 2013, 2014b). This paper investigates how differences between the motion verb lexicons of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages emerge. Phylogenetic comparative methods adopted from biology and an etymological study are used to investigate manner verb lexicons and path verb lexicons in an Indo-European dataset. I show that manner verbs and path verbs typically have different types of etymological origins and that manner verbs emerge faster in satellite-framed subgroups, while path verbs emerge faster in verb-framed subgroups.
Keywords: manner verbs, motion events, rate of evolutionary change, phylogenetic comparative methods, etymology, Indo-European, path verbs
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 30 March 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.32.1.03ver
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