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CogniTextes, Volume 15 | 2017

2017

Abstract

With respect to complex motion events, such as in (1), Talmy argues that the framing motion event ("moving into the cave") which expresses the core relationship (Path) between the moving Figure and the Ground, and the co-event ("floating") which expresses the Manner of Motion, are organized differently across languages. Thus, some components that are internal to the translatory structure or external to it may merge by an operation of conflation, defined as "any syntactic process-whether a long derivation involving many deletions and insertions, or just a single lexical insertion-whereby a more complex construction turns into a simpler one" (Talmy 1972: 257). (1) The bottle floated into the cave English (Talmy 2000: 117) 10 As seen before, and according to this framing event schema and the variation he observes in the encoding patterns, Talmy focuses on one particular spatial semantic category, Path, in order to investigate what morphosyntactic categories are responsible for its realization. He takes a function-to-form approach and demonstrates that languages characteristically realize Path either in the verb root or in a preposition (which Talmy generalizes to any adnominal category) or with a Satellite (a grammatical category of any constituent other than a noun-phrase or prepositional phrase that is in a sister relation to the verb root). Thus, he recognizes two major types of languages: (a) those who lexicalize the framing Path event in the main verb (Verb-framed languages); and (b) those who express it in the periphery of the main verb, in Satellites (Satellite-framed languages). 4 11 From a syntactic point of view, motion verbs are recognized as special, leading to spatial expressions that do not resemble other types of predicates (Boons 1987; Boons, Guillet & Leclère 1976). With this in mind, Matsumoto (2003), who focuses on the distribution of the spatial elements without excluding their semantic characterization, proposes a slightly different terminology. He replaces the terms Verb-and Satellite-framed languages by Headand NonHead-framed languages. His distinction extents Talmy's typology and specifies further the notion of 'satellite'. He underlines, for instance, the fact that all satellites are nonheads, but argues that not all nonheads are satellites. Satellites, as defined above, do not include prepositions or case markers on nominals, since they are not in a sister Motion events in Greek