Hamilton, Michael

Talmy (2007) was the first to propose a language typology based on the lexicalization patterns of motion verbs. According to his typology, certain languages tend to encode certain elements within the main verb of motion event descriptions. It has been proposed that Spanish and English exist on opposites sides of this typology and Slobin (1996 & 2006) speculates these structural differences may affect what aspects of external events are more salient to speakers of these languages.
The present study investigates the verbal and nonverbal behavior of English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals to see if any differences exist in the aspects of the motion event that they describe in an elicitation task or prefer in a similarity judgement task. This study provides evidence that Spanish-English bilinguals may be less likely to encode manner when speaking in English. The present study provides no evidence that this extends to nonverbal behavior as all groups showed a preference for categorizing motion events based on the manner (e.g., run, walk, crawl, etc.) of motion rather than the path (up, down, left, right, etc.).

This research is an examination of the morphological and syntactical features found within verb phrases of Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, a Semitic language which originates from Mesopotamia. From this examination, a configurational model is proposed, which depicts the grammatical arrangement of these morphosyntactic features during verb phrase formation. Additionally, accompanying this description of the language's verb phrases, a dependency-based approach is taken for the analysis of the language's sentence structure. Such a method departs from traditional perspectives which posit that the concept of a sentence is the compositional result of two distinct linguistic elements: a subject and a predicate (the verb phrase). However, from the analysis of the language, an argument is presented for a reconsideration of the conceptualization of a sentence that would position the verb as the primary element, or nucleus, on which all other occurring elements are either directly or indirectly dependent.