Should Talmy's motion typology be expanded to visual motion? An investigation into expressions of motion, agentive motion, and visual motion in Sidaama (Sidamo)

This chapter addresses the question of whether or not Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000b) motion typology should be expanded to visual motion (Matsumoto 2001, 2017; Slobin 2009; Cifuentes-Férez 2014), by examining how Sidaama (Cushitic; Ethiopia) expresses (i) self-agentive/non-agentive motion, (ii) agentive motion, and (iii) fictive motion along a visual emanation path. It shows that although this language closely follows the verb-framed pattern in expressing (i) and (ii), it does not do so in expressing (iii), as in many other verb-framed languages. A possible reason for this is that (iii) is not conceptualized as a macro-event, whereas Talmy's typology is built on expression patterns of macro-events. This study also observes that there are other types of events to which Talmy's typology does not apply, presumably for the same reason: they are not really macro-events.