Verb semantics has been widely approached as a dichotomy of manner and result. However, from a cognitive perspective, manner and result are often linked by intention, as captured by the ‘fulfilment type’ property formulated in the Realisation event domain in Talmy’s event integration theory. The four ‘fulfilment types’ (intrinsic-, moot-, implied-, and attained-fulfilment) indicate different degrees of result certainty in verbs. This study investigates whether manner/result complementarity is cognitively less dichotomous and more nuanced, as the four fulfilment types in verbs could indicate more than two mental representations of verbs. Through two psycholinguistic experiments, we examine whether fulfilment types influence the cognitive salience of manner and result in novel verb meaning interpretation (Experiment 1) and the semantic relatedness between English verbs with different fulfilment types (Experiment 2). Our results demonstrate that manner and result in the mental lexicon act less like a dichotomy but more like a cline. This blur between manner and result verb statuses has consequences for a language’s typological stance in the Realisation domain and implications for how Talmyan event research should be extended beyond well-studied Motion.

How people communicate about motion events and how this is shaped by language typology are mostly studied with a focus on linguistic encoding in speech. Yet, human communication typically involves an interactional exchange of multimodal signals, such as hand gestures that have different affordances for representing event components. Here, we review recent empirical evidence on multimodal encoding of motion in speech and gesture to gain a deeper understanding of whether and how language typology shapes linguistic expressions in different modalities, and how this changes across different sensory modalities of input and interacts with other aspects of cognition. Empirical evidence strongly suggests that Talmy’s typology of event integration predicts multimodal event descriptions in speech and gesture and visual attention to event components prior to producing these descriptions. Furthermore, variability within the event itself, such as type and modality of stimuli, may override the influence of language typology, especially for expression of manner.

Talmy’s (1991; 2000a; 2000b) influential work on motion events provides a strong two-way typology that can examine and account for the typology of a language, but this framework is basically synchronic. It may not be equally valid to explain language change. In this paper, we apply the event integration theory and its latest development, The Macro-event Hypothesis (Li, 2020, 2023), to account for the development of the causative verb 使-shǐ-make (SHI for short) in Chinese. This study reveals that, firstly, the multi-functional behavior of SHI represents a typical case of grammaticalization, with a full verb acquiring the role of conjunction and expressing abstract meanings. Secondly, the semantic division of the causative and non-causative uses of SHI in Contemporary Chinese is the most clear-cut. Thirdly, causative SHI shows a greater level of semantic bleaching, and the construction profiles a single causal activity and has a higher degree of event integration when compared to its lexical verbal use. The constructional grammaticalization of SHI confirms that event integration is key to its development. This study verifies The Macro-event Hypothesis of a continuum of grammaticalization in language and uncovers the process of semantic gradation that takes place in Chinese.