Variation in the encoding of motion events in Turkish

The NINJAL project on Motion Event Descriptions Across Languages (MEDAL) is a collaborative research project on crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variations in motion event descriptions. One of the purposes of this project is to investigate how Path of motion is coded across languages by conducting a video-based production experiment. This paper reports the results of Experiment C undertaken on Turkish, an allegedly prime example of a verb-framed language. One of our important findings is that Turkish displays considerable variations in Path coding across different types of Path. A head Path-coding (≈ verb-framing) pattern is found to be dominant for the Path types of FROM, TO.OUT, TO.IN, THROUGH, PAST, VIA.UNDER, VIA.BETWEEN, AROUND, ACROSS, UP, and DOWN. In contrast, a head-external Pathcoding (≈ satellite-framing) pattern is found to be preferred for the Paths ALONG, TO, and TOWARD. Rather than simply assuming a consistent "verb-framed" pattern, we claim that a more nuanced generalization is required for Path-coding patterns in Turkish and that more attention should be paid to variations in Path coding among different types of Path. We further make a crosslinguistic comparison of Turkish with other languages supposedly of the same typological type such as Japanese and Spanish.