In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:More than two decades of intense research on motion event typology, emanating from the influential proposal of Talmy (1991, 2000) of a universal binary classification of languages into verb-framed (VF), such as French, and satellite-framed (SF), such as English, still leaves many questions unresolved. One such question is whether serial-verb languages such as Thai should be considered a third type (Zlatev and David 2003; Zlatev and Yangklang 2004), generalized by Slobin (2004) as equipollently-framed (EF). A second question is whether these two or three types should be regarded as in some sense ‘distinct’ (even if they have minor expression patterns conflicting the dominant, type-characteristic ones), or rather as forming continua with respect to certain dimensions, such as the propensity to express MANNER (Slobin 2004) or PATH (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2009). A third and related question is whether the notion of language types (with respect to motion typology or in general) should not be abandoned, and languages rather be described as conglomerates of constructions and strategies, with complex overlaps (Kopecka 2006; Beavers, Levin & Tham 2010; Croft et al. 2010). In the research reported here, we address these questions, using an empirical approach based on elicited data from six carefully chosen languages. Two of these are the Romance languages French and Piedmontese, which can both reasonably be expected to be of the VF type. We also analyzed the Germanic languages Swedish and German and the Slavic language Polish, all three typically considered as SF. Finally, we included Thai (Tai-Kadai), classified as EF by Slobin (2004).

This paper focuses on regional Italian as a special observatory for both synchronic and diachronic variation in Italian. After a brief overview of some key concepts (Section 1) and the state of the art (Section 2), I consider regional Italian in a language-contact perspective (Section 3). In addition, I analyze it from the viewpoint of the reciprocal relationship between dimensions of linguistic variation (Section 4). The topics addressed here range from the process of language shift from Italo-Romance dialects toward Italian to the decreasing regional markedness of contemporary Italian. They therefore include issues related to native-like competence, ongoing restandardization, and developmental tendencies in Italian.

The paper is inspired by the typology of "dialect/standard constellations" outlined in Auer ( , 2011, which aims to detect common dynamics in the current processes of dialect/standard convergence in Europe. The specific sociolinguistic situation addressed in this paper involves Italian, Piedmontese and Occitan in Piedmont, a north-western region of Italy. We will analyze a set of linguistic features with the aim of depicting the dynamics of intralinguistic and interlinguistic convergence as they relate to the ongoing standardization processes in these languages. Some adjustments to the two types of repertoires drawn by Auer (diaglossia and endoglossic medial diglossia) will be proposed to better suit them, respectively, to the Italo-Romance continuum between Piedmontese rural dialects and standard Italian (which actually consists of two separate subcontinua with intermediate varieties) and to the relationship between Occitan dialects and their planned standard variety (as well as that between Piedmontese and its "Frenchified" standard variety).

After a wealth of studies on motion event descriptions, it seems hard to say something new: the Verb-framed/Satellite-framed typology proposed by Talmy has spawned a long debate. Among other things, previous work has shown within-type variation for one of the two language types defined by Talmy, namely Verb-framed languages. In this paper, we address this debate, showing within-type variation for the other type, Satellite-framed languages, with new data elicited from native speakers of Serbian. In order to do so, we compare it with five other languages, from three Indo-European language families (Romance, Germanic and Slavic). Our data show that Serbian is a particularly interesting case, since it is structurally Satellite-framed, but behaves like Verb-framed languages in that speakers do not always express manner and path jointly (i.e. manner in the verb and path in the satellite), as expected on the basis of Talmy’s typology. The main result of our paper is thus that there is a good deal of within-type variation for both language types identified by Talmy.

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