A typological approach to the encoding of motion events

This study reports on findings from an elicited narrative task in which native speakers of three genetically different languages, German, Polish, and Spanish, were asked to describe motion scenes from an extract of Chaplin’s City Lights. The results show that linguistic typology has an important predictive power as far as narrative style is concerned; however, since typological generalizations usually refer to tendencies rather than sharp divisions between languages, it is crucial to pay attention to the specific resources of a given language available for describing a particular conceptual domain. Specifically, although German and Polish pertain to the same typological group (satellite-framed), as opposed to Spanish (verb-framed), they exploit their predominant lexicalization pattern in a different way, and this has an enormous impact on the narrative style.