English Manner of Speaking Verbs and their Italian Translations: A Cross-linguistic Comparison

This study intends to analyze the different way in which Manner of Speaking verbs are construed in English and Italian. Following Talmy’s distinction between Satellite-framed and Verb-framed languages, we aim at demonstrating how the semantic information conveyed by these verbs may be lost or enriched when switching from English into Italian. In order to do so, four contemporary English novels as well as their Italian translations were taken into account. 83 English MoS verbs were detected for a total of 776 occurrences. Their Italian counterparts (148 between verbs and multi-word constructions) were subsequently analyzed within the Generative Lexicon model (Pustevjosky, 1998). According to our results, English and Italian show a high degree of granularity in the semantic realization of Manner of Speaking verbs. Moreover, within this domain, the opposition between a Satellite-framed language like English and a Verb-framed language like Italian seems to be blurred, since both languages, more often than not, opt to conflate Manner in the verb root.