3.2.3 Summary

It can be concluded, then, that telling the frog story in English is very different from telling it in Spanish with regards to how the motion events are portrayed. In Berman and Slobin’s words (1994: 630):

[F]rom age 5 years up, English narrators make rich use of verb-satellite elements (particles) and prepositional phrases to elaborate on locative facets of events, often incorporating both source, manner and goal within a single descriptive package, e.g., an owl flew out of the hole in the tree and knocked him down out of the tree; the deer picks him up and pushes the boy and dog off the cliff into the water; or the deer takes the boy over in the direction of a ravine, and deposits him off the side of the ravine into the creek. Even among younger English narrators, and even where vocabulary is limited to a fairly simple stock of basic, Germanic verbs, these satellites and associated phrases provide a descriptive richness well-suited to this particular story.
In addition, English narrators rely on a large number of lexically specific verbs which encode manner of motion. Use of expressions like crash, bump, pop, splash, swoop, tumble—with or without additional particles—provide speakers with a colorful descriptive mechanism appropriate to quite everyday colloquial usage.

. . . movement in space receives little attention in this verb-framed language. Generally, the verb simply indicates the direction of the path (‘enter’, ‘exit’, etc.) and although source and goal can be indicated by prepositional phrases, narrators prefer to mention neither, or—at most—only one of the landmarks of a path (‘fell’, ‘fell from the cliff’, or ‘fell to the water’—but not ‘fell from the cliff to the water’). Perhaps in order to render such minimal path descriptions interpretable, proficient Spanish narratives devote a good deal of attention to scene-setting, that is, static descriptions of the locations of landmarks. These, then, provide the background against which one or more verbs are used to trace out the path. (‘They approach a cliff, below which flows a river. He gives a push and throws him, and he falls. He remains seated in the center of the river.’) 633-4.