Thinking for translating and intra-typological variation in satellite-framed languages

Abstract

We analyze the expression of motion in translations of Tolkien’s The Hobbit into Polish and German within the framework of Talmy’s (1991, 2000) typology of macro-events and Slobin’s (1991, 1996) “Thinking for speaking” hypothesis. We show that although both languages pertain to the satellite-framed typological group, Polish provides less diversified Manner and Path descriptions than German, which exploits the satellite lexicalization pattern by far more productively. We relate these contrasts in the rhetorical style to the particular morpho-syntactic and semantic characteristics of the languages under discussion.