Motion and Space across Languages

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion, the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies, the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive, metaphorical) motion, and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1-L2 acquisition, translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation, experimentation, and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all, this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.