The grammaticalisation of movement verbs in Digo and English

The Construal of Spatial Meaning, 2013

Setting the scene-the cognitive semiotics of motion The present paper argues that the lexico-grammar of spatial Motion (as a supercategory for dynamic movement and static location, cf. Talmy 1985) cannot be understood except as an integral part of the semiotic triad of reality, mind, and language. M otion in language should thus be explained on the basis of the (Gestaltist) psychology of motion in perception, in that language 'structures' the mind's construction of motion in reality. Accordingly, the typology of motion verbs is based on an experientially founded typology of motional situations in mind. A mental motional situation is perceptual, or 'pictorial': Human beings perceive motional situations in reality by forming (concrete) 'pictures' of them with diverse figureground constellations-and recognize them as belonging to different categories (according to stored percepts). There are two kinds of picture, viz. static, or 'stable', and dynamic, or 'unstable', roughly according as the figure is static or dynamic. Furthermore, we seem to be able to construct only one situational picture at a time. A single situational picture is a simple mental Situation-a stable picture is a 'state', and an unstable picture an 'activity'. So far the notion of M otion has been Perceptual. Now, it goes without saying that the 'mentality' of Situations involves much more than simple perceptual Situations, in that situations may be conceived of as possibly integrated with one another into 'complex' Situations. A "snapshot" of what at first sight might seem to be only a state or an activity may thus show out to be the endpoint or the starting point "window", respectively, on an integrated, complex Situation involving an Activity and a State, what will be called an Action. In the first case, the State in focus would be preceded by a causal Activity; in the second case the Activity in focus would be succeeded by a resultant State, in the normal course of events. The connection between the two simple Situations in a complex actional Situation is a general relation of telicity, the causal Activity tending to actually eventuate in the resultant State. The state-focused Action will be termed an Event, whereas an activity-focused Action will be termed a Process. Illustrating this, we may conceive of a scenario where I am sitting alone in the drawing room, then leave for the kitchen and come back, and lo and behold, you are sitting there! This may be conceived of as a M otion Situation, viz. a M otion Event, where you are sitting here as a result of your, say, returning home from work, and I may second it by the utterance Nå, du er kommet hjem fra arbejde 'oh, you've come home from work'. In this case the motion for me was only conceptual, in that I didn't see, or otherwise witness it, but only inferred it. We may thus talk about Conceptual motion in such cases. When now turning to language (as a system) and the typology of motion verbs in the mental lexicon, we must add the Sign Vehicle, i.e. the phonological expression, as a representation of Percean Firstness. The linguistic Sign Object (Secondness) and Sign Interpretant (Thirdness) then recall the mental perceptual and conceptual structures, respectively, just mentioned. So the sign contents are twofold , the linguistic cognitive-semantic domain being bipartitioned into an (abstract) perception-based 'imaginal' representation (cf. Spatial Structure in Jackendoff 2002) and an (abstract) conception-based 'ideational' representation (cf. Conceptual Structure in Jackendoff 2002). 1. Background, aims, and scope 1.1 Lexicalization typology M otion event research has grown into a well-established and highly productive field. Its theoretical cornerstone are the classic studies by Talmy (1975, 1985; for further refinements, see 2000: 25ff.), supplemented by works primarily by Slobin (e.g. 1996a/b; 2004a/b), but also by others (for an overview, see M ora Gutiérrez 2001). Despite the overwhelming amount of specific works within motion event research and despite the seemingly growing awareness of the need for a more fine-grained, less schematic approach than the Talmy-Slobin framework, the core assumptions and variables of the framework nevertheless are still upheld. Talmy's basic assumption is that even though people's pre-linguistic conceptualization of e.g. a directed M otion Situation appears to be universal-involving the same fundamental components to be lexicalized (apart from Figure and Ground, Motion itself, Manner of M otion, or Cause, and Path (i.e. trajectory), the ways of linguistically lexicalizing it in different languages are not the same because not all the components are able to be colexicalized in the same (verbal) morpheme in a major lexicalization system (Talmy 1985: 76): apart from cases where only M otion is lexicalized in the verb, as in English move, either the M anner component co-lexicalizes with the M otion component in the verb, leaving the Path behind to be lexicalized in a so-called Satellite, as in M anner languages, or it is the Path component that is lexically 'incorporated' into the verb, in so-called verb-framed or Path languages, whereby the M anner component becomes secondary, left for optional expression in a con-verb or adverb. Thus, we have a nice binary typology of major lexicalization patterns, and derivatively of languages, in that it is assumed that at least most languages fit into one of these types:  Manner (or, satellite-framed) languages, like e.g., Danish, Swedish, English, German, Russian, and Chinese, where only the Manner of motion is lexicalized in the verb root together with M otion, while the direction or Path of motion is explicated elsewhere when

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.

Pragmatics & Cognition, 1995

This paper focuses on a distinction between two kinds of information in verb meanings: a highly structured, templatic part of the meaning, based on aspectual properties of the verb, and a part of the meaning which contributes to filling gaps in the templatic information. The two kinds of information d@er in the nature and degree of connections to encyclopedic world knowledge. This demarcation between the two kinds of information is related to the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, and may be clearly articulated using Krifka 's (1 992) formalization of a homomorphism from objects to events. Motion verbs, for which the concept of distance plays a crucial role in the gap-filling information, are shown to be special in a number of ways, due to the special properties of distance as encoded in the world knowledge of the speaker. The possible universality of these findings is also discussed.

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2007

This paper examines typical deictic motion verbs come and go in different languages, Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Shibe, as well as other languages in the literature, using Talmy's framework for analyzing motion verbs. While his framework makes it possible to analyze and compare the lexical semantics of deictic motion verbs viewed as Path-conflating verbs, the actual characterization of the Ground, i.e. the deictic center, is far more complicated than suggested by Talmy: "toward the location of the speaker". The analysis of deictic motion verbs in various languages reveals that there is a cross-classified hierarchy among the elements which constitute the Ground: all languages take the location of the speaker at the utterance time as the deictic center while, in addition, the location of the addressee and/or the reference time locations play the role of the deictic center in some languages. Furthermore, it is shown that the Ground of the deictic motion verbs is relativized in some languages to the referent of a particular sentence element such as the subject of the matrix subject, rather than being anchored to the participants of the speech act, which are usually considered to determine the deictic center.

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.

2014

The present study investigates the encoding of motion in Japanese motion verbs. Kita (1999) claimed that two Japanese motion verbs hairu ‘enter’ and deru ‘exit’ do not encode motion in transition but only encode change of state. Thus, hairu would not mean ‘enter’ but rather means ‘become inside’. Tsujimura (2002) replied to Kita (1999) by stating that his arguments do not hold and that these motion verbs pattern like other motion verbs, i.e. they encode transition. However, Tsujimura (2002) proposes another analysis of Japanese motion verbs whereby verbs that occur in transitive-intransitive pairs have properties of verbs of putting alongside their directed motion semantics, i.e. they can be interpreted in two ways. Other motion verbs that do not have a transitive counterpart do not display this putting verb semantics. This study aims at disentangling these two accounts by means of an acceptability judgment task in which participants judge sentences as descriptions of video clips. A...

Associated Motion, 2021

Uncorrected proofs, Oct 2020. To appear in DeGruyter Mouton series Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Typology collection from the ALT 2017 workshop on Associated Motion This chapter investigates the expression of associated motion and directional motion in the form of serial verb constructions (SVCs). In a sample of 124 languages with SVCs, 80% have motion SVCs. The most common types are directional SVCs, in which a path-of-motion verb combines with another motion verb, and prior associated motion SVCs expressing motion prior to the activity or state predicated by the other verb in the construction. Concurrent motion and subsequent motion are much less common. In a prior motion SVC, the motion verb nearly always precedes the other verb, and the figure on the path of motion is the subject. In a directional SVC, the path-of-motion verb nearly always follows the other verb, and the grammatical function of the figure on the path of motion can vary according to the semantics of the main verb in the construction.

■ ABSTRACT: In this paper, we (i) describe semantic and syntactic behavior of motion verbs in Brazilian Portuguese, (ii) analyze the lexicalization pattern of these verbs and (iii) determine how motion is represented in the lexical structure of verbs by means of primitive predicates decomposition metalanguage. We propose that all Brazilian Portuguese motion verbs lexicalize the execution of an event instead of the path or manner of motion dichotomy, as proposed in many linguistics papers. However, although motion verbs show the same pattern of lexicalization, they cannot be considered as belonging to a single verb class, because they differ in number and type of their arguments, in their lexical aspect and in their unaccusativity behavior. Thus, Brazilian Portuguese motion verbs are divided, at least, into five different classes. Each class presents its own semantic representation.

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