The motions of clothing the body in Japanese and English

McCawley (1978) in 'Notes on Japanese clothing verbs,' discusses the characteristics of clothing predicates in terms of Grice's conversational maxims. In this paper I review McCawley's observations from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. English and Japanese are commonly contrasted with each other in typological studies relating to motion predicates. Weinold (1995) argues that Japanese is a path language and English is a manner language. Talmy (1983) describes the contrast in motion predicates as a difference between verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. In addition, motion verbs show contrasts in terms of telicity. I argue that the lexicalization patterns found in motion predicates are of a more general nature that also conspire to account for differences in expressions describing dressing in Japanese.