CONTRASTING INTRANSITIVE MOTION IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN: HOW DO WE BUILD ’SOUND’ EVENTS?

Abstract

The paper addresses intransitive motion constructions in English and Serbian with the initial aim of identifying and explaining the structural (construction) templates , which are available in the two languages for intransitive motion encoding. The analysis is based on the well - known proposal by Leonard Talmy (1975, 1985, 1991, 2000) that languages fall into two main types as to how they encode motion events. Special attention is devoted to English and Serbian verbs of emission (VE) (specifically verbs of sound and verbs of light emission), regarding their potential to surface as verbs of motion and combine with directional phrases within motion event constructions. The analysis aims at contrasting both verbal sub-subclasses in English and Serbian for the purpose of identifying the relevant points of similarities and divergences between the two language systems being analysed. The theoretical claims of the analysis are empirically supported by a contrastive sentential corpus which further promotes the claim that the potential of VE is wider in scope than was initially proposed by Levin (1993).