The paper reports on a series of empirical studies in which language-specific patterns in the construal of events are investigated. The background of the studies is given by crosslinguistic analyses of the verbalisation of events in film renarrations. The results for English, German, Spanish and Arabic suggest that grammaticised categories are relevant for the strategies which speakers of different languages rely on in verbalising information. These results are confirmed by three studies which approach the question from different aspects. In the first investigation speakers are asked to verbalise a sequence of unrelated events presented on a screen. The hypothesis was that speakers of different languages select different components of the depicted scenes for verbalisation. In the second study the voice onset times for these verbalisations are measured to see whether the different event constructions are reflected in the planning processes of the utterances. In the third study comprehension of sentences referring to events is tested, using a self paced reading experiment. The results of the individual studies converge in showing that the construal of events for verbalisation follows language specific patterns.