The aim of this paper is to analyze the aspectual properties of motion verbs in French in order to redefine the notions of path and manner of motion. The literature of this domain has developed two conceptual categories of motion verbs: path verbs and manner verbs. Against this dichotomy, this article proposes three core categories of motion verbs and their intermediate classes using aspectual properties and the notion of linearity as the criteria for categorization: (i) polar path verbs that make motion events telic, (ii) directional verbs that appear in an atelic and linear motion event, and (iii) manner of motion verbs that are also atelic, but destitute of linearity.
