Starting with Talmy’s (Reference Talmy and Kimball1975, Reference Talmy and Shopen1985) work on lexicalization patterns, the scholarship on how languages represent motion has witnessed prolific achievements and advancements. Scholars have developed a series of experimental research projects on motion event expressions in their native languages, showing that Talmy’s dichotomy of language is problematic. Slobin’s (Reference Slobin, Strömqvist and Verhoeven2004) trichotomy seems to have made a complementary contribution but did not provide a substantial solution. While studies on the motion event typology have, so far, been most productive in the fields of first and second language acquisition, linguistic relativity, and contrastive linguistics, it has been much less attended to in regard to contact semantics. Moreover, the scholarship on motion event typology has had a long synchronic tradition and diachronic studies are rarely seen.

Drawing on her doctoral dissertation, Judith Huber offers Motion and the English Verb: A Diachronic Study, a contribution of ten chapters aimed at investigating the expression of intransitive motion in Old English (450–1150) and Middle English (1150–1500), with a focus on the contact between Manner-conflating Middle English and Path-conflating medieval French.

The introductory chapter offers a concise overview of the different ways motion has been explored, followed by a clearly stated description of the two aims of the book and the gist of each following chapter. The first aim is to present an extensive diachronic study on the encoding of motion events in Old and Middle English. The second aim is to examine how the Path verbs are accommodated as loan verbs in Middle English in contact with French in the late Middle Ages.

Chapter 2 addresses the theoretical framework. Huber presents a summary of Talmy’s original typology in its two versions. According to Talmy, a motion event is split into four internal-components, namely Figure (a moving or movable object, e.g. pencil in The pencil rolled/blew off the table), Ground (an object with respect to which the Figure moves or is located, e.g. table in The pencil rolled/blew off the table), Path (the respect to which the Figure moves to the Ground) and Motion (the fact that the Figure moves), and two external co-events, namely Manner (a subsidiary action or state that an object manifests concurrently with its main action or state, e.g. rolled in The pencil rolled off the table) and Cause (the action or state that results from a certain reason, e.g. blew in The pencil blew off the table). Isolating Path as the ‘schematic core’ of a motion event, Talmy poses the question of whether a motion event is encoded in the verb (e.g. English exit) or outside the verb in a so-called satellite (e.g. out in go out), resulting in two categories of language, namely verb-framing language and satellite-framing language (henceforth V-language and S-language). Drawing on a critical review of the studies of motion expressions in different languages, Huber points out the problems of Talmy’s typology, arguing that the differences between V-languages such as French or Spanish and S-languages such as English or German are not completely due to whether a language is verb- or satellite-framing, but also to the interacting factor of the morphosyntactic structure of a language and a specific ‘rhetorical style’ that these factors bring forth (19). Admitting that Talmy’s typology is fundamentally constructional, Huber proposes her own constructionist perspective, claiming that motion is associated with the structure of the surrounding sentence rather than carried by the verb itself. With a usage-based approach, Huber argues that a verb acquires its contextualized meaning when it is used. These contextualized meanings are generated by the interaction between the context and co-text. The contextualized meaning may, in turn, influence and change the decontextualized meaning. In this sense, some verbs should not be seen as Motion verbs in a narrower sense that they carry a semantic component motion. Following this analysis, Huber presents her classification of Motion verbs in a wider sense, i.e. verbs used to talk about motion. They are classified into Motion verbs that evoke a motion event frame on their own (e.g. enter), and non-Motion verbs that do not evoke a motion event frame on their own but, instead, receive a motion interpretation when used in the intransitive construction (e.g. toiled in Jacob told him why he had toiled so far) or receive a contextual motion meaning outside the construction (e.g. seek in Then people want to go on pilgrimages, and pilgrims to the Holy Land want to seek foreign countries). Motion verbs are further classified according to what they primarily express, i.e. Manner (such as drag, slide, rush, toddle, fly, drive, etc.), Path (verbs that require the additional categories of back, forward, along, around, etc.) and Neutral (verbs which do not primarily express Manner or Path, e.g. Middle English ten meaning ‘come, go, proceed, travel’).

Chapters 3–6 are devoted to motion expression in medieval English, investigating two major issues: (i) the inventory of verbs speakers of Old and Middle English can choose from when they talk about motion and (ii) verbs and structures they most typically and frequently use for this purpose. However, it is no easy work to deal with both questions since medieval speakers are only accessible through their writings, most of which belong to a rather restricted range of genres. Moreover, the texts in Middle English are often influenced by Latin and French. These factors work together to incur various problems for the present study, such as the quantity of the extant record of old English, register and genre, relevance for the usage studies, and relevance for the inventory studies. The other central problematic issue is how to establish the meaning of a given verb, particularly in different historical stages of a language. All these problems concerning the historical data are discussed in Chapter 3. Although Huber does not propose an ideal solution to these problems, which are hard to settle at present, she is most considerate in anticipating the potential confusion against the analysis in the forthcoming chapters.

By laying out the specific aims, material and method, Chapter 4 prepares the ground for the analyses of Old and Middle English motion expression that follow in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. Huber shows that medieval English is actually a Manner-salient, satellite-framing language, much like Present-day English. She investigates this issue in terms of inventory and usage, two perspectives that are shared in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 starts with a study of the Old English motion verb inventory, conducted on the basis of the Thesaurus of Old English, complemented by the resources in the Dictionary of Old English, Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, as well as the lists of Motion verbs in Ogura (Reference Ogura2002: 161–164) and Fanego (Reference Fanego2012: 41–42). Then a study of usage is conducted to find how motion is typically expressed. The studies of inventory and usage are supplemented by a case study of Old English translation of the Gospels to investigate how Old English translators render Latin Path verbs. The analysis shows that most Latin pure Path verbs (such as introire, ingredi, exire, ascendere, descendere, and adpropinquare) do not have any real native equivalents in Old English, therefore, they are rendered with Neutral verbs in the Old English translation. Huber also discusses the changing realization of Path satellites in the history of English, demonstrating that in Old English, prefixes have already become rare as a means of conveying Path information in descriptions of literal motion events; Path information is typically generated in prepositional phrases and adverbs in Old English.

Chapter 6 focuses on Middle English. Huber gives a brief overview on the intricate language contact status in the Middle English period, in which the English lexicon starts to change considerably due to the heavy influence of (Anglo-)French as well as Latin. It is even more complicated by the fact that Anglo-French, in turn, is strongly influenced by Middle English. Huber attempts to disentangle some of these intricacies and reveals that while some of the Middle English Motion verbs (e.g. travel) may look like straightforward loans from French, they actually have only acquired their motion meaning in England: either in Middle English itself or in Anglo-Norman, most likely due to fundamental influence of Middle English. In this regard, the study contributes to contact semantics, a field neglected by motion verb studies so far (Ameka Reference Ameka, Goebl, Nelde, Stáry and Wölck1996: 137). Huber also looks at the inventory of verbs that can be used to express intransitive motion and then studies Middle English motion description on the basis of text excerpts, demonstrating that while satellite-framing is relatively stable, the extent of Manner-conflation is influenced by text type and style.

The analysis in Chapters 5 and 6 reveals that both Old and Middle English have only a very limited number of (native) pure Path verbs, and that these Path verbs are used rather infrequently. Old and Middle English typically use either a Neutral motion or a Manner verb and express Path in satellites (including adverbs, prefixes, prepositional phrases). This means that the borrowed Path verbs that come into Middle English are indeed semantically unusual.

The French Path verbs and their integration in Middle English become the focus of Chapters 7–9. Chapter 7 centers on motion expressions in the donor languages of Latin and medieval French. Following a review of previous studies on the changes in the typical ways of talking about motion from Latin to the Romance languages, Huber conducts a complementary case study on motion expression in the prose parts of continental French Aucassin et Nicolette (anonymous, probably early 13th century). It is found that the structures of Motion verbs in Old French are rather similar to those in Old and Middle English except for the following three differences: (i) Old French has wide use of pure Path verbs, which are rarely seen in Old and Middle English; (ii) Old French has less frequent use of Manner verbs, especially in combination with Path satellites; (iii) Old French has less frequent realization of Path satellites as adverbs.

Chapter 8 outlines some preliminary considerations of the hypotheses, methodology, and material on which the analysis of the borrowed Path verbs in Chapter 9 is based. Chapter 9 investigates how the borrowed pure Path verbs are integrated into Middle English, studied in an innovative approach which analyses their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. It is shown that, in genuinely Middle English texts, the Path verbs mainly occur in specific, especially metaphorical and abstract meanings, most of which are related to discourse domains that had been covered by French and Latin in the triglossic Middle English period (such as administration, law, business, religion, or science). Consequently, genuinely Middle English texts use Path verbs less often as Motion verbs in the prototypical sense. Middle English translations from French or Latin, by contrast, have a tendency to feature the verbs as they are used in the donor languages, i.e. rather freely and for all kinds of literal motion events. Originally used in abstract, technical, and metaphorical contexts, some of the verbs are later used in wider contexts, while others have fallen out of use or have never really widened their usage contexts to literal motion events.

Finally, Chapter 10 provides a general conclusion, including the findings of and reflections on the analysis in the preceding chapters. With the detailed examination of the early use of the borrowed Path verbs in Middle English, the study sheds light on the cognitive and contact-linguistic aspects involved in the process of their borrowing and subsequent development. The extensive analysis of motion encoding in medieval English shows that, like other Germanic languages, it typically encodes Path in satellites (adverbs and prepositional phrases), while the verb in the intransitive motion construction, depending on text type, mostly carries a meaning of Neutral (or deictic) motion or of Manner of motion, but may also be a non-Motion verb or even absent, which testifies to the semantic content of the medieval English intransitive motion construction. This makes it a contribution to an underexplored field in the research on loanwords in English, which has so far focused primarily on the impact of historical borrowing on the vocabulary of Present-day English.

Going through the whole book, readers will find it informative and helpful in many respects. Huber distinguishes her research with a systematic examination of various Old English dictionaries and reference books, listed in Appendices A, B, and C, which cover over 200 pages. Appendices A and B serve as both the results of the study and a valuable resource for other researchers, especially those interested in Old English and Middle English. Moreover, Huber also provides the origin of each attestation in Appendix C. But it should be noted that the URLs listed do not fully match the websites. Moreover, there is still uncertainty in the typology about whether a Neutral Motion verb (e.g. Old English ten) has any specific Manner or Path associations. With the uncertainty comes the fuzzy boundary between Neutral Motion verbs and Manner/Path Motion verbs. This weakness, however, is minimized by Huber for her study. That said, the monograph serves well as a useful resource for postgraduate students and researchers of general linguistics, linguistic typology, first and second language acquisition, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics.