The boundary-crossing constraint revisited: movement verbs across varieties of Spanish

Rosalía Calle Bocanegra

Abstract:

Talmy divided the world’s languages according to how they express
movement. Spanish, a verb-framed language, purportedly constrains the use of
motion verbs expressing the manner of movement (such as roll) to contexts in which
no spatial boundary is crossed. Previous research suggests that this constraint
sometimes does not apply. We report the first large-scale investigation of the
constraint and its modulating factors (movement direction, verb type, entering/
exiting, Ground size, the preposition used) across different Spanish-speaking
communities. A task with open-ended description of animated videos, a sentence
interpretation task, and a rating task found that Spanish and Latin American
speakers (n = 180 in total) often use manner verbs to describe boundary-crossing
situations (especially entering a place), although this is modulated by the preposition
following the verb (more with a than en). Better understanding of this constraint in
verb-framed languages has applications in, for instance, L2 acquisition research.