ABSTRACT
Talmy’s motion event typology has served as a seminal framework for studying how universal event components are lexicalised and syntactically organised across languages. The implications of the typology have also been extensively investigated by Slobin and others in the context of narrative discourse, or in what is known as the ‘rhetorical style’ of a language. The present chapter extends these lines of inquiry to an underrepresented Turkic language – Modern Uyghur. Thirty adult Uyghur speakers were invited to tell the ‘Frog Story’ and the data were analysed in terms of a number of parameters that are considered to inform the typological profile of a language. Our findings showed that Modern Uyghur is a typical verb-framed language both in terms of the lexicalisation patterns speakers use and in other crucial aspects of spatial discourse. Preliminary comparisons with other typologically similar languages (e.g., Spanish, Turkish) revealed interesting intra-typological variations, which were attributed to the influence of language-specific factors.
