The parameter
A motion event has parts: something moves, along a path, in some manner. Languages agree on the parts and disagree on where to put them. Leonard Talmy's typology asks one question: which part goes into the main verb. Where the verb carries the path and manner sits elsewhere or nowhere, the language is verb-framed. Where a satellite carries it, meaning a particle or prefix attached to the verb, the root is left free for manner and the language is satellite-framed. Talmy set out the patterns in 1985 and named the types in 1991.
English is satellite-framed: run in, swim across, crawl out. German and Dutch use separable prefixes for the same job and Russian inseparable ones. Spanish, French, Turkish and Japanese are verb-framed: the verb says entrar, sortir or girmek, and manner appears as a gerund or converb if at all.
The binary division is too tight. Dan Slobin proposed a third value for languages in which path and manner take grammatically equivalent forms, chiefly serial-verb languages, and argued that the question is better seen as a cline of manner salience. A further refinement is the boundary-crossing constraint of Jon Aske and of Slobin and Nini Hoiting: Spanish allows a manner verb with a directional phrase for atelic motion but not where a boundary is crossed, so "he ran toward the house" has a Spanish counterpart and "he ran into the house" has none.
How languages vary
- Satellite-framed: path in a particle or prefix, manner in the verb root. English, German, Dutch, Russian.
- Verb-framed: path in the verb, manner in an adverbial or absent. Spanish, French, Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Hebrew.
- Equipollently framed: path and manner in forms of equal standing, usually two verbs in a series. Mandarin, Thai, many Niger-Congo languages.
No balanced count of the values exists. Assignment is a tendency rather than a rule: Romance has satellite-framed constructions at the margins, and English has verb-framed verbs such as enter, exit and ascend, most of them Latinate. The typology names the pattern a language reaches for first.
Consequences for translation
This is the clearest case in the section of a technique receiving its explanation from typology decades after it was named. Vinay and Darbelnet described chassé-croisé in 1958 as a double transposition in which two elements swap word class and position at once, taking traverser la rivière à la nage against swim across the river. They described the operation accurately without being able to say why it existed. Talmy's typology, three decades later, supplies the reason: the two languages lexicalize the same event differently, so the crossing is not a habit of French but a consequence of where each language keeps the path. The gain is practical. A technique once found sentence by sentence becomes something a translator can predict from the pair alone and a reviser can check for as a category.
The effect is asymmetric. Into a verb-framed language the verb slot is claimed by the path, so manner is demoted to a gerund or converb, or dropped, and it is routinely dropped. In Slobin's comparison of translations of one chapter of The Hobbit, Tolkien's English uses 26 types of manner verb, translations into four satellite-framed languages average 25.6 types and translations into six verb-framed languages average 17.2. The gap belongs to the pair, not the translators. Out of a verb-framed language the opposite happens: English needs a verb and a bare "went out" reads thin, so translators supply a manner the source did not.
Two practical points. Manner is sometimes evidence rather than colour: in witness statements and accident reports, how a person moved can be the contested fact, and a dropped gerund is a substantive change, not a compression. And revision needs the source: a verb-framed target that has lost the manner reads perfectly well alone. That is the half chassé-croisé the technique record warns about.
Examples
EN>ES
- Source: The bottle floated into the cave.
- Target: La botella entró en la cueva flotando.
- Comment: Talmy's standard illustration. Spanish puts the path in entró and demotes manner to a gerund. Because a boundary is crossed, the satellite-framed shape is unavailable: a restriction, not a preference.
EN>TR
- Source: She limped into the room.
- Target: Topallayarak odaya girdi.
- Comment: Turkish uses the path verb girmek and carries manner in the converb -(y)ArAk. The crossing is complete: the English verb becomes a Turkish adverbial and the English particle becomes the verb.
ES>EN
- Source: Entró en la habitación.
- Target: He walked into the room.
- Comment: The addition direction. "He entered the room" is exact; "walked in" is more idiomatic and states a manner the Spanish did not. Where manner is disputed, the flatter rendering is honest.
References
- Talmy, L. (1985). "Lexicalization Patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms." In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–149.
- Talmy, L. (1991). "Path to Realization: A Typology of Event Conflation." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17, pp. 480–519.
- Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Slobin, D. I. (2004). "The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events." In Strömqvist, S. & Verhoeven, L. (eds.), Relating Events in Narrative, Vol. 2. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 219–257.
- Slobin, D. I. (2005). "Relating Narrative Events in Translation." In Ravid, D. & Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, H. (eds.), Perspectives on Language and Language Development. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 115–129.
- Aske, J. (1989). "Path Predicates in English and Spanish: A Closer Look." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 15, pp. 1–14.
- Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais. Paris: Didier. Cited here only for the technique the parameter explains.