Motion events and the lexicon: a case study of Hindi

Anuario del seminario de Filología Vasca 'Julio de …

Journal of Universal Language

This is a semantic study of causative movement verbs that have been organized into two main groups consisting of similar and contrasting features. This analysis contradicts Van Valin & LaPolla (1997) and other authors working within the Role and Reference Grammar theoretical framework such as Jolly (1991, 1993), who defends the view that causative movement verbs only respond to one Aktionsart type (that is, to one type of mode of action): causative accomplishment verbs. I demonstrate that there are also * This paper was funded through the research project ANGI2005/14 (CAR). I would like to acknowledge the merits of my colleague and friend Rubén Fernández Caro, "a man from the Middle Ages". He gave me the passion for medieval literature and languages and helped me discover the fascinating world found in Tolkien's stories and languages, and especially in Quenya. This paper could have never been written without such underlying motivation.

Second Language Research, 2000

This paper, based on Nam's (1995) logic of space, proposes a compositional semantics of event structures in terms of eventuality type of predicates and the semantics of locatives. The paper proposes the following typology of English locatives: (i) Stative locatives, (ii) Symmetric locatives, (iii) Telic locatives, and (iv) Atelic locatives. Extending the version of Pustejovskys (1995) Event Structure, the paper further identifies five classes of eventualities: (i) e1[state], (ii) e1[process], (iii) e1*[process]+e2[state], (iv) e1[process]+e2*[state], and (v) e1*[process]+e2*[state]. It is claimed that the following patterns of telicity shifting arise in semantic composition of predicates and locatives: (i) e1[process] → e1[process]+e2*[state], e.g., run into the room, and (ii) e1*[process]+e2[state] → e1*[process]+e2*[state], e.g., load the hay on the truck. Defining paths as sequences of regions and orientations as directed rays, the paper accounts for the contrast between teli...

Linguistics, 2009

The present analysis focuses on Talmy's well-known lexicalization patterns for the expression of motion events . Languages are divided according to the preferred pattern they use; English, a satellite-framed language, encodes manner in the verb and path in a satellite (The bottle floated into the cave), whereas Spanish, a prototypical verb-framed language, encodes path in the verb, and manner in an adverbial or gerundive element, La botella entró a la cueva flotando (the bottle moved-in to the cave). Recent studies show that languages may show both encoding options , Filipovic 2007. In this paper I analyze corpus examples of verb-framed patterns in English and satellite-framed constructions in Spanish, and compare them to the preferred pattern in the other language. It is argued that the different rhetorical structure of each lexicalization pattern conveys a significant difference in meaning. This may explain why both encoding options co-occur within one language type.

Spanish, as a Romance language, can be considered a verb-framed language in Talmy's (1985, 1991) framework or a head path-coding language in Matsumoto's (2003, 2020, this volume) terminology. This means that the information related to the Path of motion is usually encoded in the main verb. Following Talmy's (2000) framework, the semantic component of Path covers three subcomponents: Vector that includes different types of trajectories-source, goals, etc., Conformation or the shape or geometric complex of Path, and Deictic or the motion to/from speaker and addressee). These subcomponents are illustrated in examples (1-3) respectively. (1) Vector El chico entra en la tienda Lit. 'The boy enters in the shop' (2) Conformation El chico rodea la casa Lit. 'The boy goes.around the house' (3) Deixis El chico viene del colegio Lit. 'The boy comes of-the school' Other authors, however, argue that these subcomponents may be worth analyzing separately given their own role in the configuration of the motion event in some languages. Deixis is such an element. Matsumoto (this volume) summarises some of the reasons why Deixis should be considered a different semantic component. First, it is always lexicalised even in languages with poor path verb repertoires. Second, it often has its own independent morphosyntactic slot (e.g. certain position in a serial verb, specific affix, etc.). Third, the use of Path and Deixis across languages does not always correlate; that is, when comparing two languages, for example, they might behave similarly with respect to Path but they might not do so in the case of Deixis, or vice versa 1. As far as Spanish is concerned, Deixis does not have a special encoding slot different from any of the slots or resources available to codify information about other semantic components. In other words, Deixis can be expressed in main verbs such as 1 In order to avoid ambiguity in the use of the term Path (Talmy's view or Matsumoto's view), this paper will treat Path and Deixis as separate elements, unless specifically stated.

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2007

This paper addresses the issue of how to characterize manner-of-motion verbs cross-linguistically, and more specifically, in Italian (a topic more fully developed in Zubizarreta & Oh (2007)). It is informative to begin by looking at manner-of-motion verbs in a serial verb language like Korean. In Korean, manner-of-motion verbs are unambiguously activity-denoting verbs; they do not encode directed motion. Compare the examples in (1) with the ones in (2). The locative-ey can denote the goal of the motion in the context of the light verbs ka-"go" and o-"come", as illustrated in (1). On the other hand, the locative-ey cannot denote the goal of motion in the context of manner-ofmotion verbs such as run, walk, swim, fly, crawl, etc., as illustrated in (2). (1) a. John-i pang-ey tul-e-ka-ss-ta John-Nom room-Loc into-L go-Past-Decl "John went into the room" b. John-i pang-ey tul-e-o-ass-ta John-Nom room-Loc into-L come-Past-Decl "John came into the room." (2) a. *John-i kongwen-ey talli-ess-ta John-Nom park-Loc run-Past-Decl "John ran to the park." Cf. John-i kongwen-eyse talli-ess-ta John-Nom park-Loc run-Past-Decl "John ran at the park" * The material in this paper has been drawn from the book On the Syntactic Composition of Manner and Motion, MIT Press, 2007

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.