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NAMED 2026 Conference

May 19-22 2026. Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Québec

In 2017, the first NAMED conference started from the observation that there has been a thirty-year period of extensive research exploring the typological distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages. Whether the Path is expressed by the verb or a satellite gave rise to abundant literature from a variety of perspectives including those in descriptive linguistics and in psycholinguistics.

As Talmy (2017) noted there is a full range of parameters of Motion description which has been left somewhat unexplored:

“[…] research on the Motion typology has mainly addressed only Manner from the full set of framing relations, and only Motion from the full set of macro-event types. And research on fictive motion has addressed mainly coextension paths out of the full set of path categories. But researchers can use their strengths in diverse languages and empirical methods to examine the remaining parameter values”. (Talmy, 2017: 1).

The NAMED conference (Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description) is a forum for discussing these unexplored aspects of motion-event description.

It goes without saying that motion is not solely expressed through verbs and particles, but it is important to emphasize this point; languages employ a variety of strategies for encoding motion, utilizing morphological and lexicogrammatical resources in distinct ways. NAMED 2026 will serve as a forum to address a relatively unexplored means of motion event encoding: the nominal encoding of motion. This topic has been largely overlooked in the community of space and motion studies and raises broader questions about the differences between nouns and verbs, particularly the special status of deverbal nouns. These differences may be absent or unmarked in some languages, others may exhibit two parallel or competing strategies driven constraints that have yet to be fully explored.

By broadening the discussion to include nominal structures, we wish to uncover how nominal motion event expression relates to the verbal domain and how the typological distinctions observed in the verbal domain behave in the nominal domain. Are they maintained, transformed, reduced? The new exploration of motion in the nominal domain could help to refine our understanding of motion verb constructions across languages.

While we want to encourage submission on the nominal expression of motion event, we also welcome papers on all sort of devices used to encode motion event, not only verbs but also adverbal and adnominal markers with which they interact. We also acknowledge that the conference will be taking place on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Nation and we therefore especially welcome papers that report on motion events in one or more indigenous languages.

Possible topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

  • In what contexts are nominal structures preferred over verbal structures for encoding motion events, and what pragmatic functions do these nominal structures serve?
  • Do motion nouns inherit verbal properties (such as argument structure and aspectual features) in their semantic structure?
  • How is motion expressed in languages with greater lexical flexibility compared to those with more rigid structures? Does a rich morphology compensate for reduced lexical flexibility?
  • Can the typological distinctions between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages be observed in the nominal domain?
  • How do representations of manner and path in the nominal domain compare to those in the verbal lexicon? For example, do we find aspectual shifts? What constraints or restrictions does the nominal domain impose?
  • What role do nominal elements play in representing motion. Can infinitives and gerunds be considered as occupying intermediate stages of dynamicity between verbs and nouns?
  • What do diachronic perspectives reveal about the pathways through which motion nouns develop?
  • How do verbal and nominal means of encoding motion interact in and across languages?
  • How do nominal structures interact with other elements of discourse to convey complex motion events?

Indicative References

Aurnague, M. 2011. How motion verbs are spatial: the spatial foundations of intransitive motion verbs in French. Lingvisticae Investigationes, 34 (1), 1-34.

Beavers J. & Koontz-Garboden A. 2017. Result verbs, scalar change, and the typology of motion verbs. Language, Linguistic Society of America 842–876.

Beavers J. & Koontz-Garboden A. 2020. The Meaning of Verbal Roots. Oxford University Press.

Beavers, J., Levin, B., Tham, S. W. 2010. The typology of motion expressions revisited. Linguistics 46, 331–377.

Bekaert, E. & Enghels, R. 2019. On the edge between nouns and verbs. The heterogeneous behavior of Spanish deverbal nominalizations empirically verified. Language Sciences 73, 119–136.

Collier, E. (in preparation) Motion Nouns and Their Verbal Counterparts: A Cognitive Functional Perspective on Motion Expressions. PhD Dissertation. Cardiff University.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford University Press.

Croft, W., Barðdal, J., Hollmann, W., Sotirova, V. & Taoka, C. 2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In H. C. Boas (Ed.), Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar (201–235). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fábregas, A. & Marín, R. 2012. The role of Aktionsart in deverbal nouns: State nominalizations across languages. Journal of Linguistics 48, 1, 35–70.

Ferret, K., Soare, E., Villoing, F. 2010. Rivalry between French –age and –ée: The Role of Grammatical Aspect in Nominalization. In: M. Aloni, H. Bastiaanse, T. de Jager, K. Schulz (Eds.), Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6042, (284–294). Berlin: Springer.

Fonteyn, L., Heyvaert, L., Maekelberghe, C. (2015). How do gerunds conceptualize events? A diachronic study. Cognitive Linguistics, 26.4: 583-612. doi: 10.1515/cog-2015-0061 Open Access

Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania (2002). World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press.

Heyvaert, L. (2003). A cognitive-functional approach to nominalization in English. (Cognitive linguistics research, 26). Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2003. ISBN: 3-11-017809-5.

Heyvaert, L. (2006). A symbolic approach to deverbal –ee derivation. Cognitive Linguistics, 17.3: 337-364.

Heyvaert, L. (2008). On the constructional semantics of gerundive nominalizations. Folia Linguistica: Acta Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae, 42.1: 39-82. 

Heyvaert, L. (2011). Attenders or attendees? Deverbal -ee and -er variants in English. Journal of Pragmatics, 43.1: 62-72. Open Access 

Heyvaert, L., Maekelberghe, C., Buyle, A. (2019). Nominal and verbal gerunds in Present-day English: Aspectual features and nominal status. Language Sciences, 73: 32-49. doi: 10.1016/j.langsci.2018.08.009 Open Access

Huber, J. 2017. The early life of borrowed path verbs in English. In I. Ibarretxe-Antunano(Ed.), Motion and Space Across Languages: Theory and Applications, (177–203). (Human Cognitive Processing 59). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Huyghe, Richard. 2021. Building a lexical database to investigate the semantics of French deverbal nouns. In Fiammetta Namer, Nabil Hathout, Stéphanie Lignon, Magda Sevcíková, Zdenek Zabokrts (eds), Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Resources and Tools for Derivational Morphology (DeriMo 2021), Nancy: ATILF, 21-30.

Langacker, R. W. 1987. Nouns and Verbs. Language, 63(1), 53–94.

Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. 2012. Linguistic manifestations of the space-time (dis)analogy. In L. Filipovic & K. M. Jaszczolt (Eds.), Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, Culture, and Cognition. (191–215). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Levin, B. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Levin, B. & Rappaport Hovav, M. 2013. Lexicalized Meaning and Manner/Result Complementarity’. In B. Arsenijević, B. Gehrke, & R. Marín, (Eds.), Subatomic Semantics of Event Predicates (49–70). Dordrecht: Springer..

Lieber, R. 2016. English nouns: The ecology of nominalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Malchukov, Andrej. 2004. Nominalization, verbalization: Constraining a typology of transcategorial operations. München: Lincom Europa.

Matsumoto, Y., 2025. Volume 1 Case Studies of Linguistic Representations of Motion. In the series The Mouton-NINJAL Library of Linguistics [MNLL].

Matsumoto, Y., Kawachi, K., 2020. Broader perspectives on motion event descriptions. John Benjamins Publishing Company

Moyse-Faurie, Claire. 2016. Referential markers in Oceanic nominalized constructions. In Finiteness and nominalization, Claudine Chamoreau & Zarina Estrada Fernández (eds), 171-203. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Noonan, Michael. 1997. Versatile nominalizations. In Essays on language function and language type. Dedicated to T. Givón. Joan Bybee, John Haiman & Sandra Thompson (eds), 373-394. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ramat, Paolo (1998). “Typological perspectives on the mapping of grammatical functions.” In Van Valin (ed.), Advances in Role and Reference Grammar. Benjamins.

Salvadori, Justine & Richard Huyghe. 2023. D’une frontière à une autre: la délimitation aspectuelle dans le domaine nominal. Verbum 45(2), 167-194.

Salvadori, Justine & Richard Huyghe. 2023. Affix polyfunctionality in French deverbal nominalisations. Morphology 33, 1-39.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 2017. Nominalization. In Handbook of Japanese syntax, Masayoshi Shibatani, Shigeru Miyagawa & Hisashi Noda (eds), 271-332. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 2018a. Nominalization in crosslinguistic perspective. In Handbook of Japanese Contrastive Linguistics, Prashant Pardeshi & TaroKageyama (eds), 345-410. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 2018b. Nominalization. In Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, Yoko Hasegawa (ed), 431-462. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L. (2017). Past, present, and future of motion research. In Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Ed.) Motion and Space across Languages: Theory and applications. [Human Cognitive Processing 59] 2017: 1–12.

Yap, Foong Ha, Grunow-Hårsta, Karen & Wrona, Janick (eds). 2011. Nominalization in Asian languages: Diachronic and typological perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Invited speakers

  • Denis Bouchard Université du Québec à Montréal
    • General Meanings and Shared Knowledge
  • Bert Cappelle Université de Lille
    • Nominal motion expressions: A bottom-up approach
  • Eric Corre Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
    • A corpus-based exploration of verbal and non-verbal means of encoding motion in four languages (English, Breton, Russian and Hungarian)
  • Liesbet Heyvaert KU Leuven
    • On the nominalization of motion events: a multilayered approach
  • Sally Rice University of Alberta
    • Go figure: Thing-framed motion events in Dene languages

Organising committee

  • Laure Sarda CNRS/ENS Paris (France)
  • Lise Fontaine UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)
  • Anne-Sophie Bally UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)
  • Amani Mahjoub UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)
  • Virginie Lacroix UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)
  • Rose-Ally Bourassa UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)
  • Nadège St-Arnaud UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)
  • Cassy Béland UQTR, Trois-Rivières, Québec (Canada)

Programme committee

  • Arnaud Arslangul Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France
  • Michel Aurnague, Laboratoire Lattice – CNRS, France
  • Philippe Bourdin, York University, Canada
  • Bert Cappelle, Université de Lille, France
  • Catherine Chauvin, Université de Lorraine, France
  • Injoo Choi-Jonin, Université de Toulouse 2, France
  • Eric Corre, Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
  • Denis Creissels, Université de Lyon, France
  • Alexandre François, Laboratoire Lattice – CNRS, France
  • Antoine Guillaume, Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage – CNRS, France
  • Tuomas Huumo, University of Turku, Finland
  • Claudio Iacobini, Roma Tre University, Italy
  • Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
  • Anetta Kopecka, Université Lumière Lyon 2, France
  • Christine Lamarre Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France
  • Yo Matsumoto, Kobe University, Japan
  • Eric Mélac, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France
  • Claire Moyse-Faurie, Laboratoire Lattice – CNRS, France
  • Dejan Stosic, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France
  • Leonard Talmy, University at Buffalo, USA
  • Piia Taremaa, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Fayssal Tayalati, Université de Lille, France
  • Thora Tenbrink, Bangor University, Wales
  • Annemarie Verkerk, Universität Saarland, Germany
  • Bernhard Wälchli, Stockholm University, Sweden



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