This study examines how Vietnamese motion events conflate semantic components in verb roots, and serial-verb constructions in light of Talmy’s and Slobin’s typological predictions. This study employed a qualitative, typologically guided analysis, and it was supported by descriptive frequency counts. The data were compiled from two dictionaries and seventeen online stories, which produced 119 manner-motion verbs, 250 path-motion verbs, 265 cause-motion verbs, and 300 contextual tokens. The results show that Vietnamese encodes core internal components, namely Manner, Path, Cause, and a limited range of Figure and Ground in verb roots, whereas external components such as Direction, Result, Circumstance, Purpose, Sound, Vehicle, State, Change, and Co-motion are expressed through verb phrases and serial verb constructions. These distributions point to a stable hybrid profile in Vietnamese that combines verb-internal packaging with expansion at the level of constructions. The study provides a more precise refinement of motion-event typology for Vietnamese and offers implications for language teaching, translation practice, and natural language processing applications.
DOI: 10.33542/JTL2026-1-6
Publication Date: 2026-06-18