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Résumé
This paper highlights some facets of motion typology, applied here to mainly English and French.
These two languages are not perfect examples of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, in
Leonard Talmy’s well-known typology, but they can nonetheless be shown to differ in a number
of related respects: compared to English (and other Germanic languages), French (like other
Romance languages) is quite constrained in its use of Manner-of-motion verbs. French also
lacks true particles – Path satellites without a Ground that can be syntactically detached from
the verb. Drawing on some of my previous research, I briefly discuss two simple but apparently
sufficiently efficient corpus-based translation studies that reveal that these differences show up
when we compare English texts originally written in English with English texts translated from
French vs. English texts translated from German (or other Germanic languages). A third, more
recent, study contrasts a single English novel with its French and Dutch translations, focusing
on expressions of visual motion. Here, too, some of the basic encoding preferences (satellite-framed
vs. verb-framed) that these languages exhibit for actual motion appear to apply, by
and large, for visual motion. This paper also lists some precursors of Talmy, one of whom is
famously linked with the linguistic relative hypothesis. It is suggested that French, because of
its typological nature, may not urge its speakers to convey much detail (neither of Manner nor of
Path) in the encoding of motion. It remains an open question, one that goes beyond the purview
of corpus linguistics, whether this stylistic difference is matched with a deeper cognitive one.
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