The present study investigates cross-linguistic differences in the description of motion events using Holistic Spatial Semantics (HSS) as a theoretical framework. In this study, six short video stimuli featuring various motion situations were used to elicit narratives from 35 speakers of French and 29 speakers of Swedish. The proportions of semantic category Path linguistically expressed did not vary significantly between the groups. However, the French narratives had significantly less Manner and Direction expression. Furthermore, they included significantly more unbounded non-translocative events compared to the Swedish narratives. Partly, this was due to the tendency within the Swedish group to construe situations as bounded events that were clearly shown as unbounded in the stimuli. There was also a tendency within the French group to distribute the information about the same situation over two clauses. These findings lend further support to the relevance of distinguishing between the Path and Direction categories, as well as other key features of the HSS framework, such as the distinction between non-verbal motion situations and their linguistic construals.

The expression of manner has been extensively studied in the case of motion event descriptions, unveiling significant typological differences between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages and cognitive differences between speakers of these languages. However, far from being restricted to this semantic domain, the expression of manner extends to other types of event descriptions and across virtually all verb classes. In this paper, by considering all the means of expressing manner and grounding our research in a domain-independent definition of this component, we investigate the expression and the transfer of manner under high cognitive pressure as evidenced by corpus data from French–English (FE) and English–French (EF) simultaneous interpreting. Unexpectedly, both French and English displayed an overall cross-domain preference for the verbal-lexical coding of manner in event descriptions, while still differing in the degree to which it was favored. In addition, although our study does not allow a direct measure of cognitive load, the FE interpreters transfer more manner from the source to the target speeches than the EF interpreters do, despite high pressure on cognitive resources, supporting the claim that manner can be cognitively more salient and accessible for English than for French speakers, not only in the domain of motion but also at a more general level, potentially in any semantic domain.

The Moving Ego and Moving Time metaphors have provided a fertile testing ground for the psychological reality of space–time metaphors. Despite this, little research has targeted the linguistic patterns used in these two mappings. To fill that gap, the current study uses corpus data to examine the use of motion verbs in two typologically different languages, English and Spanish. We first investigated the relative frequency of the two metaphors. Whereas we observed no difference in frequency in the Spanish data, our findings indicated that in English, Moving Time expressions are more prevalent than are Moving Ego expressions. Second, we focused on the patterns of use of the verbs themselves, asking whether well-known typological patterns in the expression of spatial motion would carry over to temporal motion. Specifically, we examined the frequencies of temporal uses of path and manner verbs in English and in Spanish. Contra the patterns observed in space, we observed a preference for path verbs in both languages, with this preference more strongly evident in English than in Spanish. In addition, our findings revealed greater use of motion verbs in temporal expressions in Spanish compared to English. These findings begin to outline constraints on the aspects of spatial conceptualization that are likely to be reused in the conceptualization of time.