ON THE ACQUISITION OF MOTION IN ENGLISH

Abstract

This paper discusses the acquisition of motion of native English speakers within Talmy’s (1985, 2000) typological classification of languages, the lexical elements involved in the expression of motion and the syntactic patterns emerging from their combination.
Talmy introduces a two-class typology based on how a language encodes Path of motion; he distinguishes between Satellite-framed languages (Path conveyed by a satellite: a preposition, a particle, a prefix, a directional adverb), and Verb-framed languages (the verb itself encodes Path). In this typology, English is a Sattellite-framed language. A CHILDES corpus (Berman & Slobin (1994)) of narratives was analyzed. Participants had to describe images from a frog-story picture book. Five syntactic patterns used to express motion in English were systematically investigated in terms of frequency of occurence: bare directed motion, directed motion with a manner component, Path-Manner verbs (Drăgan (2012, 2022)), Goal of Motion constructions and located motion. Talmy claims that English speakers prefer Goal of Motion construction (manner-of-motion verb with a PP), however the preferred option seems to be the bare directed motion pattern. This paper provides a comprehensive view of language acquisition and development regarding the expression of motion, exploring the intricate relations between lexical items, syntactic structures and age-related changes.