While the Talmian dichotomy between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages has been amply studied for motion events, it has been less discussed for locative events, even if Talmy considers these to be included in motion events. This paper discusses such locative events, starting from the significant cross-linguistic variation among Dutch, French, and English. Dutch habitually encodes location via cardinal posture verbs (CPVs; ‘SIT’, ‘LIE’, ‘STAND’) expressing the orientation of the Figure, French prefers orientation-neutral existence verbs like être ‘be’ and English – unlike for motion events – straddles the middle with a marked preference for be but the possibility to occasionally rely on CPVs. Through the analysis of recognition performances and gazing behaviours in a non-verbal recognition task, this study confirms a (subtle) cognitive impact of different linguistic preferences on the mental representation of locative events. More specifically, they confirm the continuum suggested by Lemmens (2005, Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais (pp. 223–244). Publications de l’Université St Etienne.) for the domain of location with French on the one extreme and Dutch on the other with English in-between, behaving like French in some contexts but like Dutch in others.

In this article we apply a folk linguistic listening task to examine how the Tver’ Karelians in Russia recognise a sample of their own dialect and a sample of Border Karelian (spoken in Finland), both recorded about 60 years ago. Tver’ Karelian and Border Karelian have a shared origin in Proto-Karelian but have been diverging from each other since the seventeenth century; the former has had strong influence from Russian and the latter from Finnish. The study investigates the Tver’ Karelians’ awareness of and observations about the Karelian language and shows that they easily recognise their own dialect, whereas the Border Karelian sample is harder to recognise and describe. However, the respondents observed and described lexical and phonetic features of this sample, and two thirds of them located the sample in the republic of Karelia or in Finland, mostly based on the ‘accent’ of the speaker.