Chapter published in:
The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French: Descriptive, experimental and formal studies on motion expression
Edited by Michel Aurnague and Dejan Stosic
[Human Cognitive Processing 66] 2019
► pp. 180–215

Motion verbs and evaluative morphology

| CLLE-ERSS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS & UT2J, France
| STL-Savoirs Textes Langage, Université de Lille, CNRS & U. Lille, France
This chapter addresses the issue of the interaction between evaluative morphology and the semantics of dynamic space in French by exploring the possibilities of constructing evaluative verbs from motion verbs. Previous research has suggested that motion verbs are relatively reluctant to serve as bases for evaluative affixation. Our aim is both to test the accuracy of this hypothesis and to account for the specificities of those French motion verbs that do allow evaluation. In doing so, we offer new insights into how evaluative morphology can contribute to the encoding of manner of motion. The empirical data on which the semantic and morphological analyses are based are extracted from extensive modern lexicographic resources and corpora.
Keywords: evaluative morphology, manner of motion, French, pluractionality, affixation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evaluative morphology
  • 3.Evaluation and pluractionality
  • 4.Evaluation, pluractionality and manner of motion
  • 5.Evaluative verbs in French: New data
    • 5.1Wiktionary as a new source of indexing deverbal evaluative verbs
    • 5.2The method
    • 5.3The results
    • 5.4Discussion
  • 6.Toward a more comprehensive account of evaluative motion verbs in French
    • 6.1Aurnague’s classification of motion verbs
    • 6.2The lexicon of motion verbs in French
    • 6.3Evaluative motion verbs in French revisited in the light of new data
    • 6.4Going beyond lexicographic resources in the study of evaluative motion verbs
  • 7.General discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Sources
Published online: 29 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.66.05sto
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