Edited by Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó
[Figurative Thought and Language 16] 2022
► pp. 141–164
Folk models of “mere” talk and “real” action shape the inferential properties of Transitive Caused-Motion (TCM) constructions with a human Patient as direct object. Physical action verbs like force into/out of semantically entail motion of the Patient into/out of a location. In contrast, constructions with speech act verbs like order into/out of pragmatically implicate motion of the Patient. Notwithstanding, cases like boo out of show that strong communicative pressure can result in entailed motion of the Patient. Finally, the contrast between constructional pairs like order somebody out of the car (stronger implicature of motion) vs. order somebody to get out of the car (weaker implicature of motion) supports the hypothesis of an iconic relationship between syntactic closeness and implicational strength.