Leonard Talmy’s influential binary motion event typology has encountered four main challenges: (a) additional language types; (b) extensive “type-internal” variation; (c) the role of other relevant form classes than verbs and “satellites;” and (d) alternative definitions of key semantic concepts like Motion, Path and Manner. After reviewing these issues, we show that the theory ofHolistic Spatial Semanticsprovides analytical tools for their resolution. In support, we present an analysis of motion event descriptions by speakers of two languages that are troublesome for the original typology: Thai (Tai-Kadai) and Telugu (Dravidian), based on the Frog-story elicitation procedure. Despite some apparently similar typological features, the motion event descriptions in the two languages were found to be significantly different. The Telugu participants used very few verbs in contrast to extensive case marking to express Path and nominals to express Region and Landmark, while the Thai speakers relied largely on serial verbs for expressing Path and on prepositions for expressing Region. Combined with previous research in the field, our findings imply (at least) four different clusters of languages in motion event typology with Telugu and Thai as representative of two such clusters, languages like French and Spanish representing a third cluster, and Swedish and English a fourth. This also implies that many other languages like Italian, Bulgarian, and Basque will appear as “mixed languages,” positioned between two or three of these clusters.

Motion-event typology has moved into a "post-Talmian" terrain of approaches focusing on an open-ended number of patterns across languages and constructions. Following a proposal to distinguish between four typological clusters, we systematically compared the motion event descriptions in four languages suggested to exemplify these clusters: Swedish, French, Thai and Telugu, with the help of an elicitation-based study. 20 adult native speakers of each language were asked to describe 52 motion events, 38 of which were translocative. The stimuli varied with respect to the parameters caused/uncaused, bounded/ unbounded motion as well as the viewpoint from which they were filmed. The descriptions were analyzed following Holistic Spatial Semantics and compared with respect to the categories Path, Direction, Region, Landmark, Manner and Cause, as well as the means of expressing these. The four languages patterned differently in significant ways. In terms of Path expression, French lagged behind the other languages, but with respect to Direction, it patterned together with Swedish. We demonstrate a number of such criss-crossing patterns, showing that there is no way to group the languages, thus implying at least four distinct typological prototypes. Further, we show that different kinds of motion situations, corresponding to different constructions, need to be compared separately.

Grammatical asymmetries in possessive constructions are overtly coded in about 18% of the world’s languages according to the World Atlas of Language Structures What primarily motivates these grammatical asymmetries is controversial and has been at the crux of the “iconicity vs. frequency” debate This paper contributes to this debate by focusing on the grammatical asymmetries of Paamese possessive constructions, and looking for the primary motivating factor in their multidimensional experiential context. After a careful account of four experiential dimensions of distance (functional, affective, sociopragmatic, and embodied), the degrees of experiential distance are shown to systematically correspond to the degrees of formal distance of the possessive constructions used to refer to these experiences (e.g., direct or indirect suffixation of kinship and body part terms). Relevant anthropological and linguistic data concerning Paamese is used to explore whether this correspondence between language and experience is primarily motivated by iconicity or economy. I argue that diagrammatic iconicity is the primary motivating factor for the grammatical asymmetries in Paamese possessive constructions, and that economy can account for some, but not all cases. I also show that economy and iconicity can collaborate in motivating some cases, and thus do not necessarily need to be opposed.

Why are expressions of irreversible separation (e.g. I feel torn apart) used to speak about the self? Are they to be treated as metaphorical? We address these questions by using concepts and methods from cognitive semiotics, and especially the conceptual-empirical loop. We develop identification and classification procedures based on intersubjective intuitions, and apply these to data from a corpus of personal descriptions of traumatic experiences. To provide a principled explanation of these expressions, we employ the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (hereafter, MSM), which distinguishes between three interacting levels of meaning making: the Situated, the Sedimented, and the Embodied. On this basis we provide a definition of metaphor, leading to the conclusion that most instances of expressions in the sample would qualify as metaphorical, while affirming that metaphoricity is a scalar notion.