Research into motion has drawn particularly on work by Talmy (Reference Talmy2000a, Reference Talmyb) and Slobin (Reference Slobin1991, Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996). Talmy distinguishes between two categories of motion events: factive, featuring physical motion, and fictive, featuring mental motion. According to Talmy, verb-framed languages (V-languages) codify paths in verb roots (e.g. ascend), while satellite-framed languages (S-languages) lexicalize paths in satellites (e.g. go up). Addressing the conception of motion, Slobin advocates a neo-relativistic ‘thinking for speaking’ hypothesis (henceforth TFS; Slobin Reference Slobin1991, Reference Slobin, Gumperz and Levinson1996), whereby every language is a subjective orientation to the world of human experience. In response to these proposals, many advances in motion typology have been achieved. Using data from a wide range of dialects and languages, and from experimental and corpus research, this research has pushed forward ‘our understanding of these systems from the perspectives of diachrony, acquisition, translation, or accompanying gesture’, as Talmy acknowledges in his Foreword to the volume under review here (1).
However, most research on factive motion so far has focused on one or two parameters of these systems: manner from the set of framing relations and motion from the set of macro-event types. Furthermore, research in fictive motion has mostly focused on coextension paths. Of the languages investigated, these have been mainly Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Altaic languages. More efforts are needed to tap diverse language resources and practical and empirical methods to evaluate the remaining parameters. The chapters of Motion and Space across Languages: Theory and Applications (henceforth MSL) respond to these issues.
MSL is divided into two main parts. Prior and posterior to these two parts are the Foreword and Afterword, respectively, by Talmy and Slobin. In both, the authors stress the importance of crosslinguistic research combining the parameters of motion events from different frameworks, and more importantly, list those neglected aspects.
Part I, ‘Delving into motion event typology’, contains eight chapters tackling some less studied and challenging areas in this field. Chapter 1, by Kimi Akita, puts forward three parameters operating in three different facets of languages to explore how and why manner is cross-linguistically different. Akita concludes that coarse-grained, event-inherent manners that speakers do not intend to stress are more likely to be realized in tight morphosyntactic constructions headed by manner verbs than fine-grained, event-concomitant manners that speakers intend to stress. The author deems that the interaction and the priority between framing typology and other typologies need to be further clarified.
Chapter 2, by Maya Hickmann, Helen Engemann, Efstathia Soroli, Henriette Hendriks & Coralie Vincent, centers on the influence of language-specific properties on verbal and non-verbal spatial cognition. It shows that languages in different typologies vary in mentioning manner and path components. For English users, path and manner are both accessible in production (e.g. roll up), but French speakers normally only mention path (monter ‘to go up’), and manner is referred to only when it is salient in discourse. When categorizing motion events, speakers of both languages show a preference for manner as a criterion, but event properties affect English speakers more. As a result, there is a twofold conclusion. First, language particulars influence verbal cognition more than non-verbal cognition. Second, the extent of accessibility of manner and path components are typologically different and the accessibility of these event properties further varies as a function of event types and tasks.
Drawing on a video-based speech elicitation experiment in typologically differing languages, Yo Matsumoto, Kimi Akita & Kiyoko Takahashi reveal in Chapter 3 that the semantics of venitive deictic verbs (i.e. motion towards the deictic center) is not merely spatial but also functional. The authors find that venitive verbs are more often used when the motion is not just toward the speaker but also into his/her functional space defined by limits of interaction and visibility. They are also frequently used for motion more generally into the speaker’s space. Furthermore, whereas motion involving an interactional behavior toward the speaker tends to trigger more venitive verb descriptions, directional venitive PPs do not clearly have such properties.
Chapter 4, by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Alberto Hijazo-Gascón & María-Teresa Moret-Oliver offers motion descriptions of intratypological variation in genetically similar and geographically closely-related Aragonese and Catalan. The authors conclude that there is no intratypological variation for manner, but there are differences with respect to path; Catalan and, especially, Aragonese, can be regarded as high-path salient languages, because speakers of both languages add extra and even redundant information about the trajectory.
As time elapses, language leads to a change in lexicalization patterns. Chapters 5 and 6 are studies in this line. In Chapter 5, Monica Mosca studies how a set of five motion constructions are codified by means of verb roots and prepositions in Late Latin and Early Italian. Drawing on data from three Late Latin travel reports and Early Italian texts, she finds that evolution is a process capable of generating different typological variants. Latin is, therefore, a complex language, rather than a pure S-language and this shift of motion construction cannot be viewed as a case of intratypological variation. In the next chapter, Judith Huber analyzes 1000 motion descriptions from Old English and Middle English texts (e.g. enter, issue, descend and ascend were borrowed from French and Latin into English in the Middle English period) and compares the usage of borrowed path verbs in autonomous and translated texts from French or Latin. This comparison reveals that, in translations, path verbs are routinely used for literal motion events, while the autonomous Middle English texts contain more verbs used for non-literal motion.
Fictive motion, subjective motion, and abstract motion are notions with different motivations to express static spatial extensions. Chapters 7 and 8 elaborate on this aspect. Chapter 7, by Johan Blomberg, finds speakers of Swedish, French, and Thai describing pictures in terms of dynamism, change of location, vantage point, and so forth. It concludes that non-actual motion expressions are conventionalized in these languages and the semantic analyses of non-actual motion descriptions show that they focus on different aspects of non-actual motion due to language restrictions. To describe the role of contextual factors in metaphorical motion, Rosario Caballero, in Chapter 8, conducts an analysis of a corpus of 301,635 words covering tennis reports, architectural reviews, and wine tasting notes. For each genre the author studies verb types, topics, participants, and goals, which make descriptions forceful and memorable as well as stimulating the evaluation of readers. She argues that metaphorical mappings are not only unidirectional from source to target domains, for instance, the expression of financial issues or emotions. Furthermore, this chapter also exemplifies that motion event studies benefit greatly from the application of corpora.
Part II, ‘Expanding motion event typology’, is mainly about the practical applications of these theoretical issues: metaphorical motion as mental simulation of physical motion, TFS’s implications for the study of second language acquisition (henceforth SLA) in motion events, intratypological differences on deixis in SLA, second-language (L2) lexicalization patterns and those patterns in the native languages (L1s), forensic translation, and applied language typology.
Research on the relation between metaphorical motion and physical motion has been limited, and still less has dealt with the effects of that relation on language acquisition. Chapter 9, by 
, Lauren J. Stites & Samantha N. Emerson, focuses on the relation between metaphorical motion and physical motion based on developmental multimodal linguistic resources from children to adults. After an overview of research on the expression of physical motion in gesture, and their experimental discoveries, the authors argue that metaphorical motion is mental simulation of physical motion.
Chapter 10, by Teresa Cadierno, discusses TFS’s implications for the study of SLA. Three criteria are proposed for SLA studies on motion events, namely, the type of motion, the type of participants, and the type of data. These are further classified as (i) the type of transfer (unidirectional vs. bidirectional), (ii) the lexicalization patterns of the learners’ L1 and L2 (same pattern vs. different pattern), and (iii) the level of language proficiency (beginners, intermediate, advanced).
In Chapter 11, Alberto Hijazo-Gascón focuses on those genetically- and typologically-related languages whose intratypological differences trigger crosslinguistic influences on specific aspects such as path, caused-motion, and deixis. The author finds that Italian should be considered as a high-path salient language as opposed to Spanish and French. The author studies next how those language contrasts have an impact on the acquisition of Spanish as an L2 by French and Italian native speakers. One finding is that crosslinguistic influence can be present in the acquisition of closely-related languages. The second main implication is the possibility of a re-TFS, observing the change in the TFS and rhetorical style in the narratives of second language learners.
The main concern of Chapter 12, by Gale Stam, is whether an L2 learner’s TFS patterns of motion continue to change in his/her L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English). The discussion is based on a 14-year longitudinal study. It first introduces co-speech gestures, which are expressed in the spontaneous gestures occurring with speech, and explains their significance. Then the chapter discusses SLA and interlanguage, as well as the application of TFS. The author finds that the speaker’s expressions of path and manner linguistically and gesturally in Spanish continue to follow an L1 Spanish TFS pattern, though there is a decrease in the percentage of her path gestures with the ground noun phrase, and continue to be a combination of L1 and L2 TFS patterns. Through dissecting the data, the chapter draws the conclusion that changes in the TFS patterns in an L2 are possible but limited and these changes influence scarcely the speaker’s motion expressions in her native language.
Chapter 13, by Ana Rojo & Paula Cifuentes-Férez, provides evidence to demonstrate that the loss of manner information can have effects on the translation of crime accounts. The studies reveal that the more manner information there is in the text, the more violent the crime is perceived to be, and the more violent the crime is, the more manner information interpreters include in their translations. The authors propose that further research is needed to determine the exact impact of typological differences and individual factors on translation.
In the volume’s final chapter, Luna Filipović explores areas that can benefit from findings that emerge from the study of typological lexicalization similarities and differences across languages. Starting with three criteria used for detecting the relevant language contrasts, the author investigates these contrasts in communication samples from different practical contexts to drive interdisciplinary empirical research. As the last chapter of Part II and the whole book, it not only provides further possibilities for applied language typology research, but also highlights the advantages of combining theoretical and applied research.
Overall, there are four general features characterizing MSL. First, it combines interdisciplinary cutting-edge research and comprehensive description of past and present analyses of motion event typology. Secondly, Part I and Part II discuss topics in terms of the theoretical and applied perspectives, respectively. Especially in Part II, motion events are analyzed by integrating with first and second language acquisition and translation. Next, data of these studies are yielded through multimodal approaches, such as corpora, experimental tasks and elicitation tools. Finally, this collection puts forward proposals and improvements for future research at the end of each chapter, inspiring and kindling more research in the field.
MSL is clear, concise and coherent. It makes an outstanding contribution to the field of motion event typology, both theoretically and empirically. It is highly recommended for graduates as well as researchers devoted to the study of relevant fields.
