Chapter published in:
Motion and Space across Languages: Theory and applications
Edited by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
[Human Cognitive Processing 59] 2017
► pp. 205–228

Chapter 7
Non-actual motion in language and experience

| Lund University

Dynamic descriptions of static situations, e.g. The road goes through the forest, have attracted a lot of attention in semantics. In cognitive linguistics, terms such as “fictive motion” and “subjective motion” are often used to describe such sentences. While these terms are taken to be largely synonymous, I argue that they are analytically different, and furthermore point to different possible experiential motivations behind this phenomenon. This leads to the pluralistic and integrative framework of “non-actual motion”. Within this framework, an elicitation study with speakers of Swedish, French, and Thai was designed and conducted. The results suggest that non-actual motion expressions are conventionalized in all three languages. The language-specific resources for expressing actual motion are used, but with elements suggesting actual motion demoted.

Keywords: fictive motion, motion semantics, subjective motion, semantic typology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Non-actual motion
    • 3.1Motion affordances and capacity for self-motion
    • 3.2Visual scanning
    • 3.3From simulation to imagination
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Material
    • 4.2Research questions
  • 5.Non-actual motion in Swedish, French, and Thai
    • 5.1NAM expressions or not?
    • 5.2A semantic analysis of NAM expressions
    • 5.3Summary
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.59.09bol
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