English path verbs: A comparative-contrastive English-Croatian analysis

Abstract: Departing from Talmy’s (2001b: 52) list comprising 20 English path verbs, we explore the semantic and syntactic properties of these verbs, focusing on their (im)possibility to select a prepositional phrase. Of particular interest in this respect are those combinations in which the (elements of) Path encoded in the PP share central semantic components with the (elements of) Path encoded in the verb (e.g. enter into). Furthermore, we explore the verbs, i.e. their various sentential realizations (taken from the corpus) from the crosslinguistic perspective, looking at the way the motional structures are realized in Croatian. We also compare and contrast the semantico-syntactic properties of the English translational equivalents for each Croatian structure under scrutiny. Interestingly, we notice that a subcategorization of English path verbs is possible on the basis of whether, in Croatian, they are rendered by a prefixed verb followed by a prepositional phrase where the form of the prefix and preposition is repetitive (e.g. ući u), or not. In conclusion, we try to systematize the crosslinguistic picture pertaining to semantico-syntactic properties of path verbs, identifying four levels of crosslingusitic systematicity (with what we call ‘the Source – Goal axis’ being the most coherent i.e. systematic one).