Manner and Path: evidence from a multilingual corpus

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of English and French translations of Norwegian predications of intransitive motion events containing the path prepositions mellom [between], gjennom [through] and over [over/across]. These three prepositions may code paths that cross a barrier. The data for the study consists of the translation equivalents in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus of intransitive motion predications containing all three Norwegian prepositions. The English translations are shown to conform by and large to a satellite-framed pattern. As for the French translations, there are differences between all three path types with respect to both verbal and adverbial coding. There are quite a few tokens in which manner is coded verbally for all three path types, perhaps more than one would expect in the case of what is commonly taken to be a predominantly verb-framed language.

Keywords

• comparative linguistics
• English
• French
• motion events
• Norwegian
• prepositions