New insights into the typology of motion in the history of French: evidence from the manner verb lexicon

Abstract

Our study aims to investigate the Talmyan typology of motion encoding in the history of French focusing on testing Slobin’s (1997, 2004) hypothesis stating that the proportion of manner verbs is greater in s-framed languages and Schøsler’s (2008) hypothesis stating that the difference between s-framed and v-framed languages is to be found in the use of manner verbs and that the nature of the texts might play a role. Our study is methodologically innovative since it tests these hypotheses against a very large dataset using tailored measures. Our findings show an increase in manner saliency (as defined in Slobin 1997, 2004), contrary to what we would expect. This increase in the proportion of manner verbs might be explained by a more general increase in the overall lexical diversity of motion expression in French. Moreover, our results support Schøsler’s hypothesis, as textual factors affect the use of manner verbs.