Many European languages derive from one common ancestor, the so-called Proto-Indo-European. Because of their common origin, they have certain characteristics in common. But because they have grown apart, there are also many differences. One of those differences is the way languages express movement. Annemarie Verkerk shows in her dissertation how these differences arose. For this she uses models from evolutionary biology.
Every language has different ways of expressing movement, but the use of these constructions varies from language to language. To clarify this difference, PhD student Annemarie Verkerk gives an example in her dissertation of a Dutch and a French newspaper headline, describing the same news item:Waaghal's Nik Wallenda walks on steel cable over Grand Canyon appeared on a Dutch news site in June last year; Le funambule Nik Wallenda traversa le Grand Canyon was the headline on a French news site.
In Dutch, a verb is used here that expresses the way of moving, namely walking. The preposition about expresses the path of movement, or the direction. The French verb traverser (cross over) only indicates the path of movement, but not how Nik Wallenda moves over the steel cable. Dancing, skipping, jumping…? Incidentally, the way of moving can indeed be indicated in French, but this is done by adding an adverb, for example à petit pas (with small steps).
Satellite
Languages such as French, which indicate the path of movement predominantly in the verb (English:verb ), linguists also refer to it as verb-framed; languages such as Dutch, which indicate direction mainly with a preposition or adverb are called satellite-framed. Like a satellite, that preposition or adverb has a certain distance from the verb, but is connected to it at the same time. Traditionally, languages have been classified either in one or the other category.
Verkerk wanted to investigate how this division is in the Indo-European language family and how it came about exactly. Before that, she compared 215 sentences in twenty translations of three bestsellers:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there by Lewis Carroll and O Alquimista (The Alchemist) by Paulo Coelho. This resulted in a corpus with sentences like:It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again.
From this sentence you can deduce that English, just like Dutch satellite-framed is, since the direction is indicated by the preposition (back ) and not with the verb (trotting =walk, trot).
Continuum
Verkerk's analysis showed that a number of languages can be classified in the traditional way. Like Dutch and English, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian fall under the satellite-framed languages. French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Albanian and Greek predominantly use the verb-framed construction. However, a number of languages remained that could not be easily classified:Serbo-Croatian, Nepali, Hindi, Persian, Armenian and Irish regularly use different constructions. However, they are on a continuum somewhere between satellite-framed and verb-framed in.
Family trees
Using family trees such as those found in evolutionary biology, the PhD student investigated how these differences came about. The family tree of a language family reflects the history of that language family. For example, Dutch and German are close to each other in the family tree of the Indo-European language family because they are closely related, while both are further removed from, for example, French.
Verkerk studied the changes in the expression of movement as they took place on the branches of the family tree. The result shows that the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto-Indo-European, was a mix of satellite-framed and verb-framed constructions, with a slight preference for satellite-framed .
Language Evolution
This analysis is consistent with literature that exists on Proto-Indo-European. This shows that the prototaal made extensive use of satellite words, words that could move freely through the sentence. In some languages, such as the Romance languages, those words are fused with verbs. That then resulted in verb-framed systems. In satellite-framed languages, the satellite words have continued to exist.
The fact that about half of the Indo-European languages developed differently from the other half is partly due to language contact. The languages in close contact with each other followed a parallel development. All in all, this research shows how languages are in motion:how they evolve and how they can grow apart. And above all, how methods from evolutionary biology can be applied to analyze language change.