Categorization of directional motion verbs

ABSTRACT

Authors: Modhala Veerababu, Prof. R.N Bakshi ABSTRACT: The present work is an attempt at a semantic analysis of a set of verbs of motion in English and Telugu.characterizing the semantic organization of the motion situation these verbs operate in, and the approach adopted in the present study, to the assumptions underlying such an approach and to its advantages as well as disadavantages.verbs of motion characterize a motion situation in which an entity moves from a source position to a goal position. The present study is concerned mainly with the semantic characterization of the motion situation which involvesthe semantic functions, Theme, Source, Goal, path and state of motion. The function ‘agent’, also participates in the motion situation if the situation is of a causative type, the situation is brought into existence as a result of the intention of a volitional entity.In Section-1 an attempts investigate into the directional verbs of movement and non- directional verbs of movement the verbs of movement which are directionally oriented constitute the feature ‘Locomotion’ (place of displacement) in common. The semantic study of these verbs can be attempted into class 1 directional verbs and the second phase throws light on various means of movement verbs grouped into class 2 directional verbs. Key Words: Semantics, Theoretical Linguistics, Thematic roles, Motion Verbs,

Linguistics, 2009

Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 2011

Two commonly-held assumptions in the literature on the Goal of Motion construction in English are, on the one hand, that there is a clear-cut distinction between verbs of inherently directed motion and manner-of-motion verbs regarding their semantics, in that the former include Path and the latter, Manner in their semantic make-up, and that affects the way in which they express motion to/towards a Goal (by combining with an obligatory/optional directional PP), and, on the other hand, that manner-of-motion verbs freely participate in the Goal of Motion construction. The present article challenges these assumptions and proposes that motion verbs in English form a continuum (a Directionality Squish) along which they range from those that always express directed motion to those that never do so.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 2006

This paper attempts to decompose the Motion event into such elements as Figure, Path, Vector, and Ground based upon Talmy's framework, which makes it possible to formally analyze and compare the lexical semantics of the deictic motion verbs within and across languages. It is shown that the difference in interpretations of the Path is attributable to the lexical specifications of both deictic motion verbs and locative phrases. It is argued that deictic motion verbs can be lexically specified for the entailment of arrival only if they express the Path eventually directed to the deictic center. A formal analysis is given based upon the HPSG framework in order to identify the elements of a Motion event contributed by each element of a verb phrase, and to determine the compositional fashion in which they are combined to give the interpretation of the verb phrase as a whole.

2005

The paper shows that directionality of motion does not have an additive status and that the sparsity of information about the manner of motion is related to the obligatory presence of a directional goal of motion.

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2009

This paper analyzes deictic motion verbs in various languages using Talmy's framework, and isolates the Path of motion expressed by these verbs. It is argued that the different interpretations of the Path so discovered are attributable to the lexical meaning of deictic motion verbs as well as locative phrases. Furthermore, deictic motion verbs are claimed to be lexically specified for the entailment of arrival only if they express the Path eventually directed to the deictic center. The arrival-time and departure-time interpretations of cooccurring point-of-time expressions are shown to coincide with the entailment of arrival, or the lack thereof, which is inherent to the semantics of deictic motion verbs.

Languages differ in the ways they divide the world. This study applies cluster analysis to understand how and why languages differ in the way they express motion events. It further lays out what the parameters of the structure of the semantic space of motion are, based on data collected from participants who were adult speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish. The participants described 37 video clips depicting a large variety of motion events. The results of the study show that the segmentation of the semantic space displays a great deal of variation across all three groups. Turkish differs from German and Danish with respect to the features used to segment the semantic space -namely by using vector orientation. German and Danish differ greatly with respect to (a) how fine-grained the distinctions made are, and (b) how motion verbs with a common Germanic root are distributed across the semantic space. Consequently, this study illustrates that the parameters applied for categorization by speakers are, to some degree, related to typological membership, in relation to Talmy's typological framework for the expression of motion events. Finally, the study shows that the features applied for categorization differ across languages and that typological membership is not necessarily a predictor of elaboration of the motion verb lexicon. Linguistik online 61, 4/13 ISSN 1615-3014 60

2020

This study discusses the use of route verbs in English and Polish expressions of fictive motion. It demonstrates that while in English the verbs cross and pass, which are prototypically used to express routing relations, can be used in most scenarios interchangeably, their Polish equivalents used in this context cannot always replace one another. This indicates that, despite sharing certain common properties, fictive motion expressions in English and Polish are highly conventionalized and subject to interactions between conceptual motivations and language specific semantic constraints.

seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy's speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.