Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions

Abstract

In this chapter, we critically examine Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. Talmy first proposed a typological classification of motion event constructions over thirty years ago (Talmy 1972, 1974, 1985); he later extended his typological classification to event constructions in general, particularly, constructions expressing events with resulting states (Talmy 1991, 2000). Talmy’s extension of his typological classification reflects a parallel generalization of the analysis of resultative constructions to include constructions of motion events with a path to a destination (e.g. Goldberg 1995, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001). Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions has been extremely influential in linguistics and psycholinguistics. More recently, however, it has started to be modified, in order to account for languages that do not quite fit into the classification. New types have been proposed, by Talmy himself and by others. We developed a similar but more detailed typology independently of the analyses offered by other researchers. We propose two revisions to Talmy’s typological classification (a brief outline is found in Croft 2003:220-24). The first is given in (1):