ABSTRACT
I met Dan Slobin for the rst time about 6 years ago during my postgraduate studies at the University of Lyon when he gave a talk entitled “Talking about motion events in two types of languages.” Coincidentally, the two language types were also the ones competing in my own mind: my native satellite-framed language, Polish, and my academic verb-framed language, French. The crosslinguistic research presented by Dan Slobin at that time inspired the development of my own research. In my comparisons of Polish and French, one of the topics that I became particularly interested in was the typological complexity of Modern French, which contrasts with the typological regularity of Polish, and the diachronic sources of this complexity. It was Dan Slobin’s enthusiastic encouragement that gave me condence to pursue this topic further.
