[Lingtyp] motion verbs

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Sergey — Interesting question! I don’t think there’s anything in the grammar of most languages that corresponds to or expresses the concept of ‘motion.’ 

The various subclasses of motion verbs can be defined on semantic grounds: path verbs entail change of location; manner verbs describe activities of agents/effectors that can cause change of location or describe change of orientation in those same agents/effectors; transport verbs are either causative path verbs or locate an object on a carrier (‘carry on back’, ‘carry on hip’, etc.), and so on. 

But there’s no overarching definition that would encompass all those subclasses, but no events that don’t involve motion. So a definition such as ’The class of all verbs of a given language that is used to describe exclusively motion events’ can at best be met disjunctively and thus doesn’t define the most “natural” concept. 

The supposedly primitive concept ‘motion’ apparently just isn’t. 

An important reference on the typology of motion verbs is Wälchli (2009). 

HTH! — Juergen

Wälchli, B. (2009). Motion events in parallel texts: A study in primary-data typology. Habilitation thesis, University of Bern.


> On Jun 6, 2022, at 9:50 AM, Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
>  How do we properly define the concept “motion verb”? I am especially interested in the telic variety, both transitive and intransitive ones.
> 
>  Best wishes,
> 
>  
> Sergey 
> 
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Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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