Dutch manner of motion verbs play a prominent role in the literature on unaccusativity. As these verbs can take both hebben ‘have’ and zijn ‘be’ as their perfective auxiliaries, they are considered to show both unergative and unaccusative behavior. The general consensus is that these verbs normally take hebben, yet occur with zijn if they are ‘telicized’ by an endpoint, and that the auxiliaries are diagnostics for the syntactic status of prepositional phrases (PPs). The paper presents (...) attested data that reveal that this generalization is untenable: there are examples that take the opposite auxiliary from what the generalization predicts. To account for the full set of data, the paper takes a cognitive-grammar perspective, arguing that auxiliary choice, telicity and syntactic status of PPs are independent issues requiring their own explanations. Auxiliary choice is analyzed in terms of alternate construals of a motion event: with hebben as a type of act and with zijn as a change of location. In this manner, the paper adds to a growing body of literature that questions the usefulness of the coarse unergative–unaccusative distinction, advocating a ‘local analysis’ instead. (shrink)

In English, deictic verbs of motion, such ascomecan encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions forvenir(“to come”), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions. We face this (...) question head on by investigating narrative productions of young Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, in comparison to English monolingual and Spanish dominant adults and children. We find that the young heritage speakers producevenirin linguistic contexts where most Spanish adult speakersdo not, but where English monolingual speakersdo, and also resemble those of young monolingual Spanish speakers of at least one other Spanish dialect, leading us to generate two mutually-exclusive hypotheses: (a) the encoding of speaker perspective in the young heritage children is cross-linguistically influenced by the more flexible and dominant language (English), resulting in a wider range of productions by these malleable young speakers than the Spanish grammar actually allows, or (b) the young Spanish speakers are exhibiting productions that are in fact licensed in the grammar, but which are pruned away in the adult productions, being supplanted by other forms as the lexicon is enriched. Given independent evidence of the heritage speakers' robust Spanish linguistic competence, we turn to systematically-collected acceptability judgments of three dialectal varieties of monolingual adult Spanish speakers of the distribution of perspective-taking verbs, to assess their competence and adjudicate between (a) and (b). We find that adultsaccept venirin contexts in which they do notproduceit, leading us to argue that (a)venirisnotobligatorily speaker-oriented in Spanish, as has been claimed, (b) adults may not producevenirin these contexts because they instead select more specific motion verbs, and (c) for heritage bilingual children, the more dominant language (English) may support the grammatically licensed but lexically-constrained productions in Spanish. (shrink)

This study develops a detailed semantic analysis of a dozen COME and GO verbs in an eastern Bantu language, Chindali. These verbs are shown to differ not only in the typical motional elements such as path and landmark encoded in the motion schema, but also in what component of the motion schema is salient. Complementing the semantic analysis is a discussion of how these verbs are combined extensively in narrative discourse to provide a detailed mapping (...) of a motion trajectory. Finally, the analysis provides support for the position that deixis is not inherent to all COME and GO expressions, but is, in the case of GO lexemes, often a pragmatic attribute of contextual use. (shrink)

Languages encode motion in strikingly different ways. Languages such as English communicate the manner of motion through verbs (e.g., roll, pop), while languages such as Greek often lexicalize the path of motion in verbs (e.g., ascend, pass). In a set of studies with English- and Greek-speaking adults and 5-year-olds, we ask how such lexical constraints are combined with structural cues in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion verbs. We show that lexicalization biases generate different (...) interpretations of novel motion verbs across ages and languages; furthermore, they generalize to the domain of caused motion. Crucially, these language-specific effects interact with universal mappings between syntactic structure and semantic content, and these interactions are respected by both adults and young children. (shrink)

Given the controversies over Mandarin Chinese in terms of Talmy’s bipartite language typology, this paper presents an exhaustive study of Chinese motion verbs collected from two authoritative dictionaries, namely, The Ancient Chinese Dictionary (2nd Edition) and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (7th Edition). An analysis of 662 motion verbs in ancient Chinese and 693 motion verbs in modern Chinese indicates that Mandarin Chinese has undergone a typological shift from verb-framed to satellite-framed as far as the (...) lexicalization pattern is concerned. The typological shift seems to have been driven by two forces, the decline of monosyllabic motion verbs and the upsurge of disyllabic motion verbs, which, upon second thoughts, can be boiled down to a single but predominant process of disyllabification in Chinese, whereby two (former) roots that bear a wide range of syntactic relations are lexicalized into a disyllabic word. Thus, we see an intriguing case of how phonology and morphosyntax interact to impact the typological properties of a language. (shrink)

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., climb, float), while languages such as Greek often encode the path of motion in verbs (e.g., advance, exit). In two studies with English- and Greek-speaking adults and 5-year-olds, we ask how such lexical constraints are used in combination with structural cues in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion verbs cross-linguistically. (...) We show that lexicalization biases affect the interpretations of motion verbs in both young children and adults across different languages; furthermore, their scope of application is larger than previously thought, since they also extend to the domain of caused motion events. Crucially, we find that the language-specific effects of such biases interact with universal mappings between syntactic structure and semantic content. Finally, we demonstrate that the combined effects of lexical and structural cues shift non-linguistic biases observed during event categorization: even though speakers of English and Greek share non-linguistic preferences in categorizing spontaneous and caused motion, they focus on different components of motion events when building hypotheses about the meaning of novel motion verbs. (shrink)

Languages differ systematically in how they map path and manner of motion onto lexical and grammatical structures (Talmy, 1985). Manner languages (e.g., English, German and Russian) typically code manner in the verb (cf. English skip, run, hop, jog), and path in a variety of other devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb affixes, etc. Path languages (e.g., Modern Greek, Romance, Turkish, Japanese and Hebrew) typically code path in the verb (cf. Greek vjeno ‘exit’, beno ‘enter’, ftano (...) ‘reach’, aneveno ‘ascend’, diashizo ‘cross’), and manner in adverbials (trexontas ‘running’, me ta podia ‘on foot’, jrigora ‘quickly’). The distinction is not meant to imply that the relevant languages lack certain kids of verb altogether. For instance, English has path verbs, such as enter, exit, ascend and descend, and Greek has manner verbs, such as treho ‘run’, kilao.. (shrink)

This paper offers a renewed construction grammar analysis of linguistic constructions in a diachronic perspective. The present theory, termedAgentive Cognitive Construction Grammar(AgCCxG), is informed byactive inference(AIF), a process theory for the comprehension of intelligent agency. AgCCxG defends the idea that language bear traces of non-linguistic, bodily-acquired information that reflects sémiotico-biological processes of energy exchange and conservation. One of the major claims of the paper is that embodied cognition has evolved to facilitate ontogenic mental alignment among humans. This is demonstrated by (...) the results of a corpus study in which the patterns of association between verbs, the particle UP and argument structure in Old and Middle English have been studied. The conclusion is that, similar to biological systems, the linguistic sign system displays patterns of equilibrium and non-equilibrium. In other words, while in Old English usage near equilibrium was reached through the use of a conservative set of constructional semiotic templates (attachment patterns), associated with motor modalities, Middle English displays high rates of randomness resulting in a less stable, yet distinct, system of constructional attachment. (shrink)

Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory, this article examines universal versus language-specific patterns in metaphorical motion event descriptions, comparing English and Turkish. The analysis focused on the crosslinguistic similarities and differences in the target domains and the types of metaphorical mappings that are structured by spatial motion. The data included written texts in English and Turkish. Results indicated strong crosslinguistic similarity in the target domains and the types of metaphorical mappings. Crosslinguistic variation, on the other (...) hand, became evident in the specification of the source domain structure, particularly in describing the manner component of a metaphorical motion event. English writers paid greater linguistic attention to the way one moves from point A to point B metaphorically, using a greater amount and variety of motion verbs that encoded manner. Overall, the analysis revealed the source domain structure to be the best candidate for systematic language-based variation in a metaphorical event. (shrink)

Recent research has demonstrated an asymmetry between the origins and endpoints of motion events, with preferential attention given to endpoints rather than beginnings of motion in both language and memory. Two experiments explore this asymmetry further and test its implications for language production and comprehension. Experiment 1 shows that both adults and 4-year-old children detect fewer within-category changes in source than goal objects when tested for memory of motion events; furthermore, these groups produce fewer references to source (...) than goal objects when describing the same motion events. Experiment 2 asks whether the specificity of encoding source/goal relations differs in both spatial memory and the comprehension of novel spatial vocabulary. Results show that endpoint configuration changes are detected more accurately than source configuration changes by both adults and young children. Furthermore, when interpreting novel motion verbs, both age groups expect more fine-grained lexical distinctions in the domain of endpoint configurations compared to that of source configurations. These studies demonstrate that a cognitive-attentional bias in spatial representation and memory affects both the detail of linguistic encoding during the use of spatial language and the specificity of hypotheses about spatial referents that learners build during the acquisition of the spatial lexicon. (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the expression of speed—one of the principal dimensions of manner—in relation to the expression of space in Estonian, a satellite-framed and morphology-rich language. Our multivariate and extensive corpus analysis is informed by asymmetries attested in languages with regard to expressing space (thegoal-over-sourcebias) and speed (thefast-over-slowbias) where we attempt to explicitly link the two. We demonstrate moderate speed effects in the data in that fast motion verbs tend to combine with Goal, and slow (...) class='Hi'>motion verbs with Location and Trajectory expressions, making verbs of fast motion similar to goal verbs in their clausal behaviour. We also show that semantic congruency (i.e., expressing semantic information repeatedly in motion clauses) overrides thegoal-over-sourcebias. That is, although verbs also occur in diverse patterns, they often combine with semantic units that mirror their meaning: goal verbs tend to combine with Goal, source verbs with Source, and manner verbs with Manner expressions. Such semantic congruency might serve as a tool for construal and, thus, is an important issue for future research. (shrink)

Languages differ systematically in how to encode a motion event. English characteristically expresses manner in verb root and path in verb particle; in Chinese, varied aspects of motion, such as manner, path and cause, can be simultaneously encoded in a verb compound. This study investigates whether typological differences, as such, influence how first and second language learners conceptualise motion events, as suggested by behavioural evidences. Specifically, the performance of Chinese learners of English, at three proficiencies, was compared (...) to that of two groups of monolingual speakers in a triads matching task. The first set of analyses regarding categorisation preferences indicates that participants across groups preferred the path-matched (rather than manner-matched) screens. However, the second set of analyses regarding reaction time suggests, firstly, that English monolingual speakers reacted significantly more quickly in selecting the manner-matched scenes compared with monolingual speakers of Chinese, who tended to use an approximately equal amount of time in making manner- and path-matched decisions, a finding that can arguably be mapped onto the typological difference between the two languages. Secondly, the pattern of response latency in low-level L2 learners looked more like that of monolingual speakers of Chinese. Only at intermediate and advanced levels of acquisition did the behavioural pattern of L2 learners become target-like, thus suggesting language-specific constraints from the L1 at an early stage of acquisition. Overall, our results suggest that motion event cognition may be linked to, among other things, the linguistic structure of motion description in particular languages. (shrink)

This paper introduces Chinese synthetic verbs and analyses their contributions to debates in manner/result complementarity studies and cognitive typology studies. Chinese synthetic verbs simultaneously express manner information and path/result information, but encode them into separate root slots under Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning. Linguistic Inquiry 43(3). 331–369) scopal modifier test, so they differ from English “manner+result verbs” and further challenge the manner/result complementarity hypothesis. Synthetic verbs followed by redundant (...) path/result verbs constitute double-framing structures that twice encode the framing information, and the non-motion case, i.e., the “synthetic verb+result verb” structure, supplements Croft et al.’s (2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex event constructions. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive studies in construction grammar, vol. 10, 201–235. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) classification that only includes the motion case, so that Chinese synthetic verbs complement the discussion on double-framing structures. This paper thereby further falsifies the manner/result complementarity hypothesis and provides an overall illustration of the double-framing structure in cognitive typology. This paper also illustrates the diachronic changes of manner, which might be universal and await further investigation. (shrink)

Talmy divided the world’s languages according to how they express movement. Spanish, a verb-framed language, purportedly constrains the use of motion verbs expressing the manner of movement (such as roll) to contexts in which no spatial boundary is crossed. Previous research suggests that this constraint sometimes does not apply. We report the first large-scale investigation of the constraint and its modulating factors (movement direction, verb type, entering/exiting, Ground size, the preposition used) across different Spanish-speaking communities. A task with (...) open-ended description of animated videos, a sentence interpretation task, and a rating task found that Spanish and Latin American speakers (n = 180 in total) often use manner verbs to describe boundary-crossing situations (especially entering a place), although this is modulated by the preposition following the verb (more with a than en). Better understanding of this constraint in verb-framed languages has applications in, for instance, L2 acquisition research. (shrink)

Syntactic templates serve as schemas, allowing speakers to describe complex events in a systematic fashion. Motion events have long served as a prime example of how different languages favor different syntactic frames, in turn biasing their speakers toward different event conceptualizations. However, there is also variability in how motion events are syntactically framed within languages. Here, we measure the consistency in event encoding in two languages, Spanish and Swedish. We test a dominant account in the literature, namely that (...) variability within a language can be explained by specific properties of the events. This event-properties account predicts that descriptions of one and the same event should be consistent within a language, even in languages where there is overall variability in the use of syntactic frames. Spanish and Swedish speakers (N= 84) described 32 caused motion events. While the most frequent syntactic framing in each language was as expected based on typology (Spanish: verb-framed, Swedish: satellite-framed, cf. Talmy,2000), Swedish descriptions were substantially more consistent than Spanish descriptions. Swedish speakers almost invariably encoded all events with a single syntactic frame and systematically conveyed manner of motion. Spanish descriptions, in contrast, varied much more regarding syntactic framing and expression of manner. Crucially, variability in Spanish descriptions was not mainly a function of differences between events, as predicted by the event-properties account. Rather, Spanish variability in syntactic framing was driven by speaker biases. A similar picture arose for whether Spanish descriptions expressed manner information or not: Even after accounting for the effect of syntactic choice, a large portion of the variance in Spanish manner encoding remained attributable to differences among speakers. The results show that consistency in motion event encoding starkly differs across languages: Some languages (like Swedish) bias their speakers toward a particular linguistic event schema much more than others (like Spanish). Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the typology of event framing, theories on the relationship between language and thought, and speech planning. In addition, the tools employed here to quantify variability can be applied to other domains of language. (shrink)

Do children’s single words related to motion and change also encode aspects of environmental events highlighted by Talmy’s motion event analysis? If so, these meanings may predict children’s early verb meanings. Analyzing the kinds of meanings expressed in single “dynamic event words” through motion event semantics yields links between early true verbs in sentences and the semantics encoded in these single words. Dynamic event words reflect the sense of temporal and spatial reversibility established in the late (...) sensorimotor period. We propose that these dynamic meanings provide the semantic foundation for the most common verbs included in early sentences, and thus a bootstrap to full development of the verb repertoire. In this study, we followed the spoken language development of five children. We identified dynamic event words as encoding dynamic change in the following dimensions: spatial direction in relation to self; vertical spatial direction; figure/ground relationships; and temporal event sequences. Verbs continuing the semantics previously identified in dynamic event words occurred early and dominated the verb repertoire through 24 months of age. (shrink)

All human activity including motion is construed mentally with reference to different objects and spatial relations that are relevant (Waliński 2014). Following the work of Talmy (1985, 2000) on categorization of languages on the basis of motion events into verb framed languages and satellite framed languages, this paper addresses the typology of the Tugen language regarding motion events. It takes into consideration the reclassification of the V-languages into equipollent frame and the doubling frame, (Slobin 2003; Croft et (...) al. 2010). Further it explores the hybrid system as expounded by Schröder (2016) on the categorization of V-languages so as to cater for languages that do not fit into the equipollent and the doubling frame. This paper analyses motion events in Tugen, a Kalenjin language belonging to the southern Nilotic cluster. In this analysis, Tugen is seen as both verb framed language and satellite framed as a result of prevalence of deictic directionals and the applicative. The language also bears an associated motion affix which relates simultaneous motion to non-motion events. The associated motion affix renders the motion events to be satellite framed. The occurrence of deictic directionals on motion events that are verb framed can also be taken to be instances of doubling frame. (shrink)

Aristotle posits that time, as defined by the “number of motion in respect of before and after” (_Physics_ IV 11.219b1-2), is an inherent property of motion itself rather than a prerequisite. This implies the possibility of identifying time-independent properties of natural motions. One such critical feature, crucial to understanding the basic meaning of time, is the presence of an inherent order of before and after within motion, regardless of time. The concept of a non-temporal before and after (...) within motion is now accepted or seriously considered in scholarly discussions. However, it remains one of the most confusing and difficult issues in the interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of time. How can we conceive of motion apart from time? Moreover, how does Aristotle seemingly take this aspect for granted? In order to address these issues, I propose to combine philosophical inquiry with grammatical and mathematical reflections. I will examine the analysis of motion alongside the verbs used to describe it, with a keen focus on aspect. Hence I will draw connections between the relationship of motion and time and that of physical and mathematical objects. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between participation and motion with respect to the natural philosophy of the "Phaedo". Aristotle’s criticism of participation and its failure to account for motion shows the relevance of the dialogue to this problem. Challenging Aristotle’s critique, I interpret the "Phaedo" as offering a possible solution to the question of how forms cause motion in material beings. The verb ὀρέγεσθαι at 65c8, 75a2, and 75b1, together with the active ὀρέγειν at 117b2, ground an (...) account of ontological striving as a solution to the difficulties inherent in participation within the literary context of the dialogue. (shrink)

The two event-related potentials studies investigated how verbs and nouns were processed in different music priming conditions in order to reveal whether the motion concept via embodiment can be stimulated and evoked across categories. Study 1 tested the processing of verbs primed by two music types, with tempo changes and without tempo changes while Study 2 tested the processing of nouns in the same priming condition as adopted in Study 1. During the experiments, participants were required to (...) hear a piece of music prior to judging whether an ensuing word is semantically congruent with the motion concept conveyed by the music. The results show that in the priming condition of music with tempo changes, state verbs and inanimate nouns elicited larger N400 amplitudes than action verbs and animate nouns, respectively in the anterior regions and anterior to central regions, whereas in the priming condition of music without tempo changes, action verbs elicited larger N400 amplitudes than state verbs and the two categories of nouns revealed no N400 difference, unexpectedly. The interactions between music and words were significant only in Tasks 1, 2, and 3. Taken together, the results demonstrate that firstly, music with tempo changes and music without tempo prime verbs and nouns in different fashions; secondly, action verbs and animate nouns are easier to process than state verbs and inanimate nouns when primed by music with tempo changes due to the shared motion concept across categories; thirdly, bodily experience differentiates between music and words in coding fashion but the motion concept conveyed by the two categories can be subtly extracted on the metaphorical basis, as indicated in the N400 component. Our studies reveal that music tempos can prime different word classes, favoring the notion that embodied motion concept exists across domains and adding evidence to the hypothesis that music and language share the neural mechanism of meaning processing. (shrink)

Cognitive-linguistic theories commonly model speakers’ grammatical knowledge as a network of constructions related by a variety of associative links. The present study proposes that structural priming can provide psycholinguistic evidence of such links, and crucially, that the method can be extended to non-alternating constructions. In a comprehension priming experiment using the “maze” variant of self-paced reading, English caused-motion sentences were found to have an inhibitory effect by slowing down participants’ subsequent processing of resultatives, and vice versa, providing evidence that (...) speakers store distinct but related representations for the constructions. Priming effects of a similar magnitude emerged in both directions, suggesting that the constructions are bidirectionally related, while not supporting previous claims about a metaphorical asymmetry between the patterns. Moreover, priming was only marginally affected when prime and target contained the same rather than different verbs, demonstrating that cross-constructional priming in comprehension can be observed in the absence of a “lexical boost”. The results raise questions for follow-up research on the role of inhibition in the grammatical network and the extension of structural priming to other types of constructional links. (shrink)

Cet essai a pour motif central le mythe de l'Annonciation, fondateur de l'Europe contractualiste moderne. Il étudie l'importance de l'invasion des " barbares", de la rencontre avec l'Autre et du contrat que l'on passe avec lui, entente étrange d'où naît le sujet politique libre. Il a l'originalité de parler de l'Europe - le dernier continent inexploré -à partir d'un point de vue américain et de parler du politique à partir de textes littéraires: les écrits de Dante, Sade et Aquin. C'est (...) dans une petite barque, une embarcation toute frêle, que nous nous sommes lancé à la découverte d'un continent à peu près inconnu, plus farouche que le continent noir, plus sauvage que les Amériques, et composé de substances plus volatiles, plus inflammables que l'Asie ou l'Orient... Car le continent sur lequel nous avons mis le cap, c'est celui du Verbe. (shrink)

Many studies have shown that about three biological motions can be maintained in working memory. However, no study has yet analyzed the difficulties of experiment materials used, which partially affect the ecological validity of the experiment results. We use the perspective of system anatomy to decompose BM, and thoroughly explore the influencing factors of difficulties of BMs, including presentation duration, joints to execute motions, limbs to execute motions, type of articulation interference tasks, and number of joints and planes involved in (...) the BM. We apply the change detection paradigm supplemented by the articulation interference task to measure the BM working memory capacity of participants. Findings show the following: the shorter the presentation duration, the less participants remembered; the more their wrist moved, the less accurate their memory was; repeating verbs provided better results than did repeating numerals to suppress verbal encoding; the more complex the BM, the less participants remembered; and whether the action was executed by the handed limbs did not affect the WMC. These results indicate that there are many factors that can be used to adjust BM memory load. These factors can help sports psychology professionals to better evaluate the difficulty of BMs, and can also partially explain the differences in estimations of BM WMC in previous studies. (shrink)

As Macnamara (1978) once asked, how can we talk about what we see? We report on a study manipulating realistic dynamic scenes and sentences aiming to understand the interaction between linguistic and visual representations in real-world situations. Specifically, we monitored participants’ eye movements as they watched video clips of everyday scenes while listening to sentences describing these scenes. We manipulated two main variables. The first was the semantic class of the verb in the sentence and the second was the action/ (...) class='Hi'>motion of the agent in the unfolding event. The sentences employed two verb classes—causatives (e.g., break) and perception/psychological (e.g., notice)—which impose different constraints on the nouns that serve as their grammatical complements. The scenes depicted events in which agents either moved towards a target object (always the referent of the verb-complement noun), away from it, or remained neutral performing a given activity (such as cooking). Scenes and sentences were synchronized such that the verb onset corresponded to the first video frame of the agent motion towards or away from the object. Results show effects of agent motion but weak verb-semantic restrictions: causatives draw more attention to potential referents of their grammatical complements than perception verbs only when the agent moves towards the target object. Crucially, we found no anticipatory verb-driven eye movements toward the target object, contrary to studies using non-naturalistic and static scenes. We propose a model in which linguistic and visual computations in real-world situations occur largely independent of each other during the early moments of perceptual input, but rapidly interact at a central, conceptual system using a common, propositional code. Implications for language use in real world contexts are discussed. (shrink)

The linguistic path has been explored through several works. The present paper investigates a path underlain by the fictive motion phenomenon: The plateau goes east along the river. This itinerary, here called the ‘localization path’ discloses the FM of an item along a trajectory to highlight its immobility in space. This linguistic path is here inspected through a corpus-based analysis displaying the verbs come and go. If experiencing language is first vocal, this process also implies kinetic, non-verbal modalities. (...) The languaging experience will hence be explored through the interaction between language, space and the speaker’s body through an enactive approach. A prototypical syntactic configuration mirroring the interpretative grid of FM reality will be defined. Recurrent syntactic patterns revealing the way the speaker projects his own world through simplex models will highlight the way the complexity of visual scenari is converted into linguistic sequences. (shrink)

The study of how languages differ in their portrayal of motion events has received much attention since Talmy provided the first detailed account of the phenomenon. Interest has extended from real, or factive motion, to imagined or fictive motion, and from there to metaphorical motion, in which experience in one sensory domain is understood in terms of motion. Studies of metaphorical motion have, however, concentrated so far on a limited number of sensory domains, principally (...) vision, and drawn data from a limited number of textual genres. The aim of this study is to identify the extent to which motion expressions are employed to express organoleptic sensory experiences, that is experiences of taste and smell. Drawing on analytical categories put forward by Talmy in his treatment of Satellite- and Verb-framed languages and on treatments based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory, and particularly the concept of ‘embodiment’, we investigate the variety and complexity of organoleptic Paths evidenced in two self-built corpora of craft beer reviews, one in Spanish, the other in English. We also compare the level of complexity evident in these sensory Path types with those of another, closely related, sensory domain: vision. The study finds, in line with related studies, that English has greater variety and complexity of sensory Paths than Spanish. A more unexpected result is the finding that organoleptic Paths are more varied and complex than visual Paths. This finding, then, may encourage us to reconsider Path complexity differences in sensory domains as a multifactorial issue and not simply as a cognitive-linguistic phenomenon. It is proposed here that external factors such as genre, or specifically, its communicative functions and linguistic constraints, coupled with the unique ‘perceptual landscapes’ created by each sensory modality, may transcend perceived physical boundaries of a Figure’s trajectory. (shrink)

An eye-tracking while listening study based on the blank screen paradigm was conducted to investigate the processing of literal and metaphorical verbs of motion. The study was based on two assumpti...

James A. Diefenbeck, Wayward Reflections on the History ofPhilosophyThomas R. Flynn Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume 1:Toward an Existential Theory of HistoryMark Golden and Peter Toohey Inventing Ancient Culture:Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient WorldZenonas Norkus Istorika: Istorinis IvadasEverett Zimmerman The Boundaries of Fiction: History and theEighteenth‐Century British Novel.

We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003, Cruschina 2013), in which a motion verb V1 from a restricted set is followed by an event verb V2 and both verbs are inflected for the same person and tense features. The interpretation of DIC involves a complex event which behaves as a single, integrated event by linguistic tests. Based on data drawn from different sources, we argue that DIC is an asymmetrical serial verb (...) construction (Aikhenvald 2006). We propose an analysis of DIC in which V1 and V2 enter the semantic composition as lexical verbs, with V1 contributing a motion event and projecting a theme and a goal argument which are identified, respectively, with an agent and a location argument projected by V2. A morphosyntactic mechanism of feature-spread requires that the person and tense features be realized both on V1 and on V2, while, semantically, these features are interpreted only once, in a position from which they take scope over the complex predicate resulting from the combination of V1 and V2. The semantic analysis is based on an operation of event concatenation, defined over spatio-temporally contiguous events which share specific participants, and is implemented in a neo-Davidsonian framework (Parsons 1990). (shrink)

Earlier work on literal motion has shown that English and Turkish belong to typologically distinct classes of languages, with English speakers paying greater linguistic attention to the manner dimension of motion events (e.g., Özçalişkan and Slobin 1999a, 2003). As a further step, this article investigates whether typological differences hold true for the metaphorical extensions of motion events. Thus, the article compares two types of languages with regard to their lexicalization patterns in encoding metaphorical motion events: (1) (...) verb-framed languages (or V-languages, represented by Turkish), in which the preferred pattern for framing motion events is the use of a path verb with an optional manner adjunct (e.g., enter running), and (2) satellite-framed languages (S-languages, represented by English), in which path is lexicalized in an element associated with the verb, leaving the verb free to encode manner (e.g., run in). The analysis of written texts and elicited responses in the two languages shows clear typological contrast, with English speakers encoding manner of motion in their metaphorical descriptions more frequently and extensively than Turkish speakers, using a variety of linguistic devices (e.g., verbs, adverbials). Overall, the results indicate that the degree of codability of a semantic dimension in a lexical item (i.e., motion verb) has a spillover effect on the choice of other lexical items in a sentence, suggesting the conceptual salience of this dimension for its speakers. This effect is observable in both the literal and the metaphorical uses of the lexicon. (shrink)

Physical and emotional intimacy between humans and robots may become commonplace over the next decades, as technology improves at a rapid rate. This development provides new questions pertaining to how people perceive robots designed for different kinds of intimacy, both as companions and potentially as competitors. We performed an randomized experiment where participants read of either a robot that could only perform sexual acts, or only engage in non-sexual platonic love relationships. The results of the current study show that females (...) have less positive views of robots, and especially of sex robots, compared to men. Contrary to the expectation rooted in evolutionary psychology, females expected to feel more jealousy if their partner got a sex robot, rather than a platonic love robot. The results further suggests that people project their own feelings about robots onto their partner, erroneously expecting their partner to react as they would to the thought of ones’ partner having a robot. (shrink)

Berber languages use the directionals =d and =nn to specify the deictic path of motion verbs. These clitics occur with a range of verbs from other semantic classes (e.g. change of state verbs, verbs of vision and perception), with which they can be attributed different meanings. The first goal of this paper is to provide a cross-dialectal description of these meanings. The second goal is to show the role of verbal semantics in their constructions and (...) the overall distribution of the clitics. Adopting Talmy’s framework (2000) of lexicalisation of semantic concepts, linked to the domain of space and motion, I propose that the particular meaning components lexicalised by the modified verb govern the occurrence of the clitics and their particular meaning. (shrink)