Anatol Stefanowitsch (University of Bremen)

Place: Aud A, Sydneshaugen skule

        Time: Thursday October 1., 12.30-14.00

Title: On PATH and MANNER in English Motion Clauses

In encoding motion events, the languages of the world fall into two major categories: those that encode the PATH of the motion outside of the verb (for example, in a spatial adverb or a prepositional phrase), leaving the verb free to encode other aspects of the motion event, and
those that encode PATH in the verb itself. Three hypotheses have been suggested as to why this typological distinction should exist: (i) the existence of a “boundary-crossing constraint” in some languages that does not allow MANNER to be specified when the motion event encoded
crosses a boundary (Slobin); (ii) a “complexity constraint” that makes it difficult to encode RESULTATIVITY and MANNER simultaneously (Levin) and (iii) the presence of PATH prepositions in a given language (Folli/Ramchand). In my talk, I show that the complexity constraint is most likely to be the correct interpretation, as it exerts a subtle influence even on languages that do allow the combination of MANNER and PATH, such as English. This influence can be uncovered only by the methods of quantitative corpus linguistics.