Diachronic study of the typology of motion verbs in the Romance languages

Talmy (1975, 2000) proposes a typology where languages either fall into satellite-framed or verb- framed types. Challenges to Talmy’s typology citing examples in Spanish (Aske 1989, Slobin 1996, Naigles et al. 1998) Italian (Iacobini 2009, 2012; & Fagard 2011; & Masini 2007), French (Dufresne et al 2001; Kopecka 2006; Pourcel & Kopecka 2006), Catalan (Acedo Matellan 2010, & Mateu 2013), and Romanian (Dragan, 2007) all point out ‘exceptions’ to the typology. The diachronic investigation of Medieval French by Burnett and Troberg (2017), which is the first in- depth study of the framing typology in the evolution of Romance from Latin, describes an unexpected transition from Latin to Romance. I conduct a corpus-based search for these s-framed structures in Medieval Spanish, both those inherited from Latin and those innovated independently by Medieval French. The results of the investigation show that Spanish and French take two very different paths in their evolution from Latin to Romance. Based on this, I propose a new framework for looking at s-framed and v- framed structures, languages, and language families. I discuss the theoretical implications of this on the typology and the understanding about multidirectional typological change.