Typological change in the expression of motion events from Latin to Romance languages.

2011

Romance languages differ from other Indo-European languages (e.g. Germanic languages) in the expression of motion events. In a broad typological perspective, they are classified as Verb-Framed languages, in contrast with Latin, which is considered Satellite-Framed (Talmy 2000); however, recent proposals tend to refine this classification in terms of preferred constructions (in given contexts) rather than global types (Beavers et al. 2010). The rich documentation of both Latin and Romance varieties allows us to evaluate this typological change within its synchronic and diachronic contexts and variation factors. Moreover, although the encoding of motion events has recently drawn a great deal …