Typology of Motion Event in Tunisian Arabic

ABSTRACT. Following Talmy’s work (Talmy 1985, 2000) in the domain of motion events, languages fall into two types according to how they lexicalize directed motion event. Talmy’s typology has led researchers to classify languages as either satellite or verb-framed languages, although they do not all fit comfortably into this dichotomy. As a Semitic language, Tunisian Arabic is considered a verb-framed language. We will see that this language presents other strategies in the encoding of motion event. 1 Introduction to Tunisian Arabic The language of our study is Tunisian Arabic, a spoken language that is the native language of a large majority of Tunisians. It has its own linguistic system which differs from the codified and standardized variety called Standard Arabic, hence, providing this interesting angle for study