4.1 Evidence from English

Talmy recognized that English also has path verbs, but he dismissed them by saying that they are mostly borrowings from Romance languages, and not frequently used (see Chapter 2.2.2 above). In this section, English path verbs will be considered.

Levin (1993) lists the following verbs as inherently directed motion verbs (i.e. path verbs):

(4.1) Verbs of inherently directed motion (Levin 1993: 263)

advance, arrive, ascend, ?climb, come, cross, descend, depart, enter, escape, exit, fall, flee, go, leave, plunge, recede, return, rise, tumble

Verbs such as leave, cross, pass, rise and enter are quite commonly used in English. If come and go are considered, since they are among the most frequent of all English verbs, the assertion that English expresses path mostly via the satellite to the verb can be seriously challenged. Nevertheless, there are grounds to think that go is a semantically empty verb as, for example, Bennet (1975) argues. Verbs like climb and fall add the complication that, apart from being very frequently used, they can be thought of as combining both manner and path in their meaning. This is problematic for a typological proposal that depends so much on the separation between manner and path.

If agentive motion verbs are taken into account, English also presents some very frequent path incorporating verbs. Consider for example bring and take, which can be viewed as the agentive causative counterparts of come and go. They are among the most frequent verbs in English. Again, it could be argued that take is as semantically empty as go. Other frequent agentive verbs are pull, push, throw, and verbs with similar meaning.