The encoding of motion events is an important semantic domain in all languages. Crosslinguistically, it shows opposite types of lexicalisation patterns, as widely demonstrated by Talmy, Slobin and many others. In particular, there is a typological dichotomy between verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. The Germanic family typically belongs to the S-languages, whereas the Romance languges are V-languages. This paper focalizes on the Dutch-Italian language pair, arguing that Dutch is particularly sensible to the special effects of action and motion, whereas Italian is more oriented on static descriptions. This has important consequences for translation between these two language types.
