Investigating Motion Events in Austronesian Languages

S. Huang and M. Tanangkingsing found that six Western Austronesian languages share the common property of giving greater attention to path information than to manner. They proposed that Proto-Austronesian was probably path-salient. In order to ascertain the validity of their hypothesis, this study compares the motion events in a Yami Frog story with six Western Austronesian languages, followed by a research design using VARBRUL (a logistic regression analysis program) to analyze the factors that account for the variation between path and manner verbs in 20 Yami texts. In the process, a clear set of operational definitions is proposed. Our quantitative analysis indicates that Yami is a path-salient language in that (i) path verbs are more frequent than manner verbs, (ii) path verbs favor cooccurrence of figure and ground even more than manner verbs, and (iii) manner is usually not expressed after the path verb. If it is expressed, it is coded as a serial verb construction.