Motion events in Greek

Abstract

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to languages that cannot be adequately described in Leonard Talmy's traditional framework of Satellite-framed and Verb-framed languages, resulting in cline-based and construction-based typologies. In the current paper, we focus on Greek, which has been said to have both Satellite-framed and Verb-framed characteristics. We compare two datasets, one experimental and one corpus-based, to uncover the impact of coding decisions and the implications for the classification of Greek as compared to Satellite-framed English and Verb-framed French. We situate the results from these two datasets in a wider analysis of motion theory, and show that taking into account semantic, syntactic and morphological aspects fares better than the exclusive focus on lexicalization patterns which was common in earlier work. We demonstrate the impact of the method of data type and the coding schemes on the characterization of linguistic patterns.

Keywords

• motion events
• linguistic variation
• English
• French
• Greek