Motion events in Changana spoken narrative

Abstract

This article examines the expression of motion events in Changana. The typological classification of this southern African Bantu language is proposed based on the results collected from the elicited narrative of Mayer’s picture book Frog, where are you?. Fifteen frog stories narrated by adult Changana speakers from Mozambique were analysed. In the light of Talmy’s typology expanded by Slobin, the results suggest that Changana falls into the domain of verb-framed languages (or Path languages), a typology that is shared by most languages across Africa. However, it differs fundamentally from the prototypical verb-framed language in terms of the expression of manner. In its turn, Changana is a manner-salient language, with a diversified lexicon of manner verbs and a dense lexicon of motion ideophones, which makes it a non-prototypical verb-framed language.