Correlation between path verb lexicon and binary typology of motion event: a contrastive study between Chinese, Spanish, and English

Abstract

There are two perspectives on the relationship between path verb lexicon and a language’s dominant pattern —verb-framed language (VFL) or satellite-framed language (SFL)—: Matsumoto (2003) considers that the path verb lexicon of a language is partially independent of its dominant pattern, while Verkerk (2014, 2015) argues that VFLs have more path verbs that describe Path in more detail than SFLs. In this article, we build a path verb lexicon that does not exist in Chinese (SFL), and we contrast it with that of Spanish (VFL) and English (SFL) coming mainly from Cifuentes (2008). The study shows that Chinese path verb lexicon is basically independent of its dominant pattern and that Chinese has more path verbs that describe Path with more granularity than Spanish and English.