Typological features of Telugu: defining the parameters of post-Talmian motion event typology

ABSTRACT Recent research in motion event typology has moved beyond the binary Talmian division of “verb-framed” and “satellite-framed” languages and has established the existence of at least four distinct typological clusters, instantiated by, for example, Swedish (Germanic), French (Romance), Thai (Tai-Kadai) and Telugu (Dravidian). In this paper, we focus on characteristic features of Telugu, as a representative of the fourth cluster. In the study, 30 native Telugu speakers described video-recorded translocative events, in which the factors boundedness, viewpoint and causation were manipulated. Using the model Holistic Spatial Semantics, we show that Telugu speakers (a) preferentially used Direction verbs rather than Path verbs, (b) predominantly used case markers rather than verbs for encoding Path, (c) extensively used Landmark and Region expressions, and (d) frequently used Manner verbs in situations of “boundary-crossing” unlike speakers of typical “verb-framed” languages. We propose these features to be criterial of the fourth typological cluster mentioned above, a claim to be investigated in future research.