Moving through space in Metamorphosis. The linguistic transcoding of movement in Ovid and his translators.

In this contribution, we show how the Metamorphoses and transla- tions of Ovid’s original text from a broad diachronic arc in the history of the Italian language together offer an invaluable resource for the study of motion encoding in the passage from Latin to Italian. Taking Talmy 2000 as a starting point, we note a typological shift from a satellite-framed form of motion encoding (Latin) to a verb- framed form (with Italian). However, the fact remains that, from our contemporary perspective, it is only through a detailed analysis of the morphosyntactic strategies and semantic components involved in motion encoding that it will be possible to classify languages in any meaningful way. Not only this, in order to observe phenomena of vari- ation and continuity between Latin and Italian, a comparable form of data is required. With this in mind, a diachronic, target-variant corpus based on translations of the Metamorphoses is currently being compiled, and we set out the advantages it offers and prospects for analysis going forward.