Intratypological Variations in Motion Events in Japanese and French

Cross-linguistic comparison needs at least one criterion by which differences or similarities are identified, and it is the morphosyntactic realization of path information that is used as the criterion of comparison in the Talmy’s typology (cf. Talmy 2000). According to this framework, Japanese and French indeed show the same distribution pattern of path information and they are categorized among the verb-framed languages. However, they exhibit at the same time many differences, in particular, for expressions of manner and deixis; in spite of the similarity of the realization of non-deictic path information, Japanese represents manner and deixis more frequently than French does. Our argument converges on proposing intratypological variations between Japanese and French as parameters for cross-linguistic comparison; the frequency of manner pertains to the facility of the association of motion-event and co-event, and the notion of deixis, i.e., the speaker’s cognition of spatial orientation, should be distinguished from the other path components. An investigation into the differences found in languages of the same typological category will allow us to propose some useful parameters for cross-linguistic comparison and to account for the real states of languages.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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