The family of Germanic satellite-framed languages revisited: intra-typological variation and multilingual implications.
(2025) Usage-based Approaches to Multilingualism – Language acquisition, language contact, language attrition — submitted
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- Dutch, English and German belong to the class of Germanic languages which, in typological terms, have been defined as satellite-framed languages (Slobin 2017; Talmy 2017). They express the path of motion preferably with satellites and the manner dimension in the main verb. Although these three languages belong to the same typological class, they differ in the way in which they realize these dimensions. With examples from different oral and written corpora our study aims to show how (directed) motion and location are distinguished and expressed in the three Germanic languages and how the distinction is dependent on morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors, thereby realizing the satellite-framed pattern in a more or less prototypical way (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017). More specifically, we show how English has the possibility to make a difference between location and directed motion, i.e. motion along a path and towards a goal, with the use of different prepositions like in, on (location) vs. into, onto, upon (directed motion). By contrast, in German, one and the same preposition can be used to express both location or motion. However, with the morpho-syntactic case-marking after the two-way prepositions it is possible to differentiate between location (with the dative case) and directed motion (with the accusative case). Dutch does not have case-marking, but word order plays a dominant role: prepositions contribute to the expression of location whereas postpositions with the same form are used for motion along a path. German has a similar construction as Dutch with “anadeictic particles” (Ágel 2017) which appear in pleonastic constructions. The study further zooms in on so-called German “verbless directives” (Jacobs 2008), e.g. Ab ins Bett (lit. ‘off into the bed’), which are common in oral German speech but hardly used in English or Dutch. They constitute the prototypical instantiation of the satellite-framed pattern as they only consist of a nominal phrase with satellites. This is possible thanks to the complex interrelation of case-marking in German and the broad variety of prepositions and (deictic) particles for the expression of motion.
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De Knop, S. (2025). The family of Germanic satellite-framed languages revisited: intra-typological variation and multilingual implications. In Antje Quick, Nikolas Koch & Stefan Hartmann (ed.), Usage-based Approaches to Multilingualism – Language acquisition, language contact, language attrition. De Gruyter. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260106