Verbs of inherently directed motion in two different modality languages, eurpean portuguese and LGP : some typological reflections

Abstract

In the chapter we analyse two verbs of inherently directed motion such as ir go and vir come in two different modality languages EP (European Portuguese) and LGP (Portuguese Sign Language), in order to discuss their main properties. We show that Romance languages, and Portuguese in particular, are not only verb-framed in the way they express motion and manner of motion and we show the importance of Prepositional Phrases in the construction of argument structure of verbs. As for Sign languages, and specifically LGP, we show, starting from a brief corpus, that this language, being closer to an equipollently-framed language, has some properties that indicate that verbs are not the only way to express movement. We conclude that more important than a typological classification it is crucial to analyse morphological, lexical and syntactic resources that languages have in order to express manner and path of motion.