26 Åke Viberg
- Introduction
The typological profile of a language is a characterization of its structure in relation
to other languages with particular focus on language-specific features. Reference
can be made to various levels such as the phonological, grammatical or the lexical
profile, which is the topic of a series of studies to which the present paper belongs
(see Viberg 1993, 2006). To a great extent, this research is based on multilingual
corpora and owes much to the work of Stig Johansson (see e.g. Johansson 2007).
The following is an extended version of a study of vehicle verbs (Viberg 2008)
which form a sub-field of motion verbs. As a background a brief survey will be
given in Section 2 on the field of motion verbs in Swedish from a typological
perspective.- Motion verbs: From general typology to contrastive comparison
2.1 The typological perspectiveThe well-known distinction introduced by Leonard Talmy (1985, 2000) between
verb-framed languages, where path of motion is encoded in the verb (e.g. French
descendre), and satellite-framed languages, where the path of motion is expressed
in satellites outside the verb such as particles (e.g. English step down), has served as
a point of departure for much work on the typology of motion verbs, in particular
in a series of studies by Slobin (e.g. Slobin 1996, 2004). Like other Germanic lan-
guages, Swedish follows a satellite-framed pattern. As mentioned by Levinson and
Wilkins (2006: 527), this pattern may be very restricted typologically, which means
that it should be regarded as a language-specific areal phenomenon. Based on a
broad review of recent studies, Beavers, Levin and Wei Tham (2010) point out that
most languages have been found to have at least some characteristics that cut across
Talmy’s divisions and some languages do so in a conspicuous way. They propose a
new framework based on the general, motion-independent grammatical and lexi-
cal resources available for encoding motion and certain other general principles.
In spite of what has been said above, Talmy’s typology has served as a good
point of departure for the comparison of European languages, although the divi-
sion into verb- and satellite-framed languages is today best regarded as a con-
tinuum (or a set of continuous parameters) and may eventually be completely
replaced by another framework. As shown by Filipović (2007), Serbo-Croatian –
with certain restrictions – can use a manner verb to express motion in the way
English does in examples of the type He ran into the room, where the change
of place is completed, but must use a directional verb in the way Spanish does