The expression of semantic components and the nature of ground entity in orientation motion verbs

In this chapter, we describe six orientation motion verbs in French and Korean, which express a deictic motion and/ or frontal or vertical orientation. This comparative study strengthens the view that the nature of entities such as “location” and “object” plays an important role in object selection in both languages. We also propose to refine the semantic components of motion put forward by Talmy (1985, 2000). Through a detailed description of each type of orientation motion verb, we show that both lexical selection and grammatical object marking depend largely upon the composition of orientation verbs which include deictic motion verbs in Korean, but not in French.

Published online: 18 April 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.20.08cho