Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions

Talmy’s typological classification of motion events, later generalized to manner vs. result event encoding, has been highly influential in linguistics and psychology. Recently, crosslinguistic comparison has indicated that it is in need of revision, in particular to account for symmetric eventencoding constructions such as serial verbs. We extend Talmy’s classification to include various symmetric constructions as well as others. We also argue that a comparative analysis of specific situation types in English, Icelandic, Dutch, Bulgarian and Japanese reveals that each language uses different event encoding strategies for different types of events. This small sample suggests that there are implicational universals relating event types and event-encoding constructions that are semantically motivated. We also present evidence of grammaticalization paths that can lead to the spread of syntactically more integrated eventencoding constructions.