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Goal prevalence and situation types: An empirical analysis of differences in Greek and German motion event descriptions

Georgakopoulos, Thanasis
Härtl, Holden

The aim of the current study is to investigate crosslinguistic differences in the encoding of motion events and the distribution of their constituent parts, that is, the manner as well as the path focusing mainly on the Goal component. In the abundant literature on the effect of the lexicalization pattern of a language (Satellite- versus Verb-framed), only a few studies have systematically taken into account the specific properties of the situation underlying a verbalization. With a focus on German and Greek, we analyse verbal descriptions of motion events presented in video clips and link the linguistic characteristics of the different verbalizations to the salience of the Goal point. We find that in situations containing highly evident Goals towards which the motion is targeted, German speakers tend to realize Goals more often than Greek speakers. This finding is complemented with a crosslinguistic examination of the inventory for expressing manner and path of motion as well as by an analysis of the type of information expressed in the verbalizations. We discuss both in the context of the continuum between Satellite- and Verb-framed languages.

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@inbook{doi:10.17170/kobra-202107224394,
  author    ={Georgakopoulos, Thanasis and Härtl, Holden},
  title    ={Goal prevalence and situation types: An empirical analysis of differences in Greek and German motion event descriptions},
  keywords ={400 and Kontrastive Morphologie and Kontrastive Syntax and Neugriechisch and Deutsch and Bewegungsverb and Verbalisierung},
  copyright  ={https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/},
  language ={en},
  publisher  ={Universität Kassel},
  year   ={2020}
}