Should Talmy’s motion typology be expanded to visual motion?

Abstract This chapter addresses the question of whether or not Talmy’s ( 1985 , 1991 , 2000b ) motion typology should be expanded to visual motion ( Matsumoto 2001 , 2017 ; Slobin 2009 ; Cifuentes-Férez 2014 ), by examining how Sidaama (Cushitic; Ethiopia) expresses (i) self-agentive/non-agentive motion, (ii) agentive motion, and (iii) fictive motion along a visual emanation path. It shows that although this language closely follows the verb-framed pattern in expressing (i) and (ii), it does not do so in expressing (iii), as in many other verb-framed languages. A possible reason for this is that (iii) is not conceptualized as a macro-event, whereas Talmy’s typology is built on expression patterns of macro-events. This study also observes that there are other types of events to which Talmy’s typology does not apply, presumably for the same reason: they are not really macro-events.