2.2.4 Other types

According to Talmy, this three-way typology is apparently exhaustive. This raises the issue of why other lexicalization patterns are not the characteristic type in any known language. Thus, one element, the ground, does not form the basis of any lexicalization pattern. To imagine what this would imply, Talmy gives the example of American English -plane in verbs like emplane and deplane, which he takes to mean "move with respect to an airplane" (75), conflating motion and ground, with the path expressed by the prefixes. It could be conceivable to imagine a language in which verb roots like -plane would be the norm, with other hypothetical forms, like circumplane, transplane, applied to a wide range of grounds. But none has been found so far. As an explanation, Talmy speculates with the idea that the ground object is the least salient component in a motion event. Another possibility could be the existence of a hierarchy. Thus, path-type languages are more frequent than manner ones, with figure-type a distant third. Ground conflation would be last in the hierarchy, with such low frequency that it has not been discovered yet in any known language.

Other possibilities include the conflation of more than one component. Talmy illustrates this with the conflation of ground and path present in a whole minor system of verbs in English with forms like shelve "cause to move onto a shelf" and box "cause to move into a box"(76).¹ Another example he gives is the conflation of figure and path in verbs such as powder and scale (scale the fish). The reason this type of lexicalization pattern does not appear as a major system in any language has to do with how uneconomical it would be. A large number of lexical entries would be needed to express the different combinations of the two components. Using box as an example, other verbs would be needed to express the meanings "take out of a box", "move around a box", and so on.

NOTAS
 

1 Many of Levin's pocket verbs lexicalize both the path and the ground (Levin 1993: 121).