The expression of the manner of motion in Portuguese and other languages

We compared verbs expressing the manner of motion in oral narratives by speakers of Romance and Germanic languages, respectively classified as verb-framed and satellite-framed according to L. Talmy’s Motion Typology. We used a Bayesian statistical analysis on aggregated and disaggregated data from 12 speakers per language. For Brazilian Portuguese, we used data from 14 speakers. Considering inter-typological variation, the manner per motion-verb ratios demonstrated a more varied use of manner verb types by the speakers of the satellite-framed languages, as expected from theory: German (0.33), English (0.46), Spanish (0.18), Italian (0.17), French (0.08), and Brazilian Portuguese (0.23). These results also show a substantial similarity between Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, with slightly fewer types of manner verbs in the French narratives. In general, speakers of Germanic languages preferred to use manner over other types of verbs, with mean per-speaker rates of 5.10 and 5.27 for German and English, respectively. In contrast, the mean rates demonstrated a preference for other verb types (such as path verbs) among speakers of Romance languages: Italian (1.37), French (1.22), Brazilian Portuguese (2.21), and particularly Spanish (0.98): Analysis of disaggregated data for Brazilian Portuguese and English showed substantial variability among speakers in their use of motion verbs in general and manner verbs in particular. It brought the rate of manner-verb usage down for English to 4.35 and Brazilian Portuguese to 1.86.