Linguistics Circle Seminar - 9 January 2026

This event will be taking place on Friday 9 January 2026 at 12:00-13:00 face-to-face in the University of Malta, Gateway Building Room 256.

Title of this Seminar

Situating Maltese within the motion event typology: a preliminary investigation

Ms Kirsty Azzopardi (Maltese Department, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta)

Abstract

This presentation is concerned with motion, a basic notion for which all languages appear to have some means of expression. A comparison across languages reveals recurring patterns, indicating that there is more than one way to encode motion events. Following Talmy’s (1985) foundational work, four core components are assumed to be present in a motion event — Figure, Ground, Motion and Path — while Manner and Cause may be optionally expressed. A certain degree of cross-linguistic variation becomes evident when comparing the locus of expression of the Path component.

English, for instance, typically encodes Motion in the verb, while the Path or trajectory of motion is expressed in another element, as in went out or go up. In contrast, Spanish displays a tendency for both Motion and Path to be encoded in the verb, as in salió ‘exit’. Based on this interaction between semantics and syntax, a typology has been established, distinguishing Satellite-framed languages, like English, from Verb-framed languages, such as Spanish.

The aim of this study is to locate Maltese within the motion event typology. For this reason, a subset of Maltese active participles is investigated with respect to (i) the semantic components of motion they encode and (ii) the syntactic mapping of these components. Of particular interest is the fact that Semitic and Romance languages, to which Maltese is historically and structurally linked, are typically argued to follow the Verb-framed pattern, while English — with which Maltese was in contact — is a prototypical Satellite-framed language.

References

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalisation patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (Vol. 3, pp. 57-149). Cambridge University Press.