This chapter addresses the issue of “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion in French. The semantics of verbs of strict autonomous motion is first captured through their spatio-temporal schemata defined in terms of change of basic locative relation and change of placement. The possibility, for the verbs, of appearing in implicit landmark constructions, their association with a spatial PP having an opposite “polarity” and the prepositions’ contribution to dynamic spatial descriptions are successively reviewed in order to identify the most important properties of asymmetry of motion in French. Several of these properties seem to ensue from the spatio-temporal structure of motion events. A pragmatic principle is also highlighted, which is likely to favor the emergence of goal bias in language.
This chapter deals with the syntactic status of locative constituents combining with motion verbs in French. It aims at answering the following questions: are locative PPs arguments or adjuncts? To which extent does the semantic structure of motion verbs determine the obligatory or optional presence of locative constituent?
In the first part of the chapter, I discuss the general assumption that Manner and Path cannot be encoded in the same verb. This restriction intersects with the two-way typological division between Verb framed languages and Satellite framed languages. As an alternative view of motion description, I present the classification criteria, proposed by Aurnague (2011), which provides new tools to rethink motion beyond the classical opposition between Manner and Path. Relying on a corpus study, I systematically apply a series of syntactic tests to the main classes of motion verbs. I show that locative PPs are tied to the verb to several degrees and that the semantic structure of verbs strongly impacts their syntactic properties.
In this chapter, I describe the evolution from Latin to French, focusing on a specific typological change: that from a Satellite-framed to a Verb-framed language, in the (much debated) dichotomy established by Talmy (1985). The goal of the paper is to describe in detail the loss, between Medieval and Modern French, of one important feature of Satellite-framed languages: Satellites. In order to do this, I rely on a quantitative and qualitative diachronic corpus study of a series of adverbs with particle uses in Medieval French, following their decline throughout the diachrony of French. I describe the uses of these adverbs and their gradual disappearance, which has left room for other spatial grams, mainly adpositions.
The chapter deals with the lexical coding of manner of motion in French. A twofold aim is pursued: to provide a better understanding of what manner is from the semantic point of view and to determine what makes some motion verbs express manner and others not. First, I show that there are five types of linguistic devices involved in the expression of manner: lexical, syntactic, morphological, grammatical and prosodic ones. Next, I propose a more comprehensive definition of the concept of manner, arguing that it is compositional by nature and by no means monolithic. Finally, adopting Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s lexical decomposition approach, I report an in-depth semantic analysis of 562 manner of motion verbs in French and show that manner interpretation in their meaning is generated by a small set of more basic, non-idiosyncratic semantic features which fill a modifier position and whose role consists in diversifying, and thereby in modifying, the root predicate.
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.
This chapter reports the results of a corpus study on fictive motion (the use of motion verbs to describe motionless scenes) in French, carried out to investigate some proposals made by Langacker, Matlock, Matsumoto, and Talmy regarding this topic. The 589 attested utterances collected show that fictive motion involves more verbs and entities than is generally assumed. The suggested explanations draw on Aurnague’s semantic analysis of motion verbs and Vandeloise’s account of the meaning of spatial markers in terms of force dynamics and functional properties. The phenomenon is also analyzed in its discursive context, with a presentation of some properties of the “discourse mode” in which fictive motion expressions appear.
In the last few decades there have been several attempts to connect language use with cognitive mechanisms underlying event representation. This language-thought interface is difficult to capture and highly debated. This chapter provides an overview of empirical and experimental studies relevant to this debate, focusing on the relation between eye movements, categorization and linguistic variation in the domain of motion events. It raises theoretical and methodological questions that have important implications for linguistic typology and cognitive studies more generally.
This chapter contributes to the present discussion about the expression of motion in French by presenting a psycholinguistic study that focuses on how information about motion is structured not only in speech but also in co-speech gesture. Interested in developmental and cross-linguistic perspectives, we included adults as well as 5- and 10-year-old children and compared French with a typologically different and less commonly studied language – Czech. Using data from narrations of short video clips featuring various motion events, we found that, in French, gestural expression of motion is organized more similarly to verbal expression of motion than in Czech. We also observed an age-related increasing tendency to include more information about motion into fewer clauses and gestural strokes.
This chapter deals with the automated formal analysis of a specfic interpretation of fictive motion named the “virtual traveler”, involved for instance in the French equivalents of a sentence like The path descends for two hours where it is possible that no-one actually descends. Our analysis in computational semantics yields the intended logical formula in the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory. It relies on a framework, the Montagovian Generative Lexicon that integrates lexical semantics into compositional semantics.
The backbone of the proposal in this chapter is an automatic parser and a formal encoder of information describing places, spatial and verbal relations in textual documents in order to reconstruct and map the textually described itinerary. These tools allow us to show how to combine the information expressed in French texts, referring to places, spatial actions associated with them, and data found in external geographical resources to build a geocoded representation of an itinerary. Our approach focuses on the automatic reconstruction of routes and transcribes them in their geographical setting, identifying locations and routes by interpreting spatial information in a dynamic space context.
This chapter addresses the issue of “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion in French. The semantics of verbs of strict autonomous motion is first captured through their spatio-temporal schemata defined in terms of change of basic locative relation and change of placement. The possibility, for the verbs, of appearing in implicit landmark constructions, their association with a spatial PP having an opposite “polarity” and the prepositions’ contribution to dynamic spatial descriptions are successively reviewed in order to identify the most important properties of asymmetry of motion in French. Several of these properties seem to ensue from the spatio-temporal structure of motion events. A pragmatic principle is also highlighted, which is likely to favor the emergence of goal bias in language.
This chapter deals with the syntactic status of locative constituents combining with motion verbs in French. It aims at answering the following questions: are locative PPs arguments or adjuncts? To which extent does the semantic structure of motion verbs determine the obligatory or optional presence of locative constituent?
In the first part of the chapter, I discuss the general assumption that Manner and Path cannot be encoded in the same verb. This restriction intersects with the two-way typological division between Verb framed languages and Satellite framed languages. As an alternative view of motion description, I present the classification criteria, proposed by Aurnague (2011), which provides new tools to rethink motion beyond the classical opposition between Manner and Path. Relying on a corpus study, I systematically apply a series of syntactic tests to the main classes of motion verbs. I show that locative PPs are tied to the verb to several degrees and that the semantic structure of verbs strongly impacts their syntactic properties.
In this chapter, I describe the evolution from Latin to French, focusing on a specific typological change: that from a Satellite-framed to a Verb-framed language, in the (much debated) dichotomy established by Talmy (1985). The goal of the paper is to describe in detail the loss, between Medieval and Modern French, of one important feature of Satellite-framed languages: Satellites. In order to do this, I rely on a quantitative and qualitative diachronic corpus study of a series of adverbs with particle uses in Medieval French, following their decline throughout the diachrony of French. I describe the uses of these adverbs and their gradual disappearance, which has left room for other spatial grams, mainly adpositions.
The chapter deals with the lexical coding of manner of motion in French. A twofold aim is pursued: to provide a better understanding of what manner is from the semantic point of view and to determine what makes some motion verbs express manner and others not. First, I show that there are five types of linguistic devices involved in the expression of manner: lexical, syntactic, morphological, grammatical and prosodic ones. Next, I propose a more comprehensive definition of the concept of manner, arguing that it is compositional by nature and by no means monolithic. Finally, adopting Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s lexical decomposition approach, I report an in-depth semantic analysis of 562 manner of motion verbs in French and show that manner interpretation in their meaning is generated by a small set of more basic, non-idiosyncratic semantic features which fill a modifier position and whose role consists in diversifying, and thereby in modifying, the root predicate.
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.
This chapter reports the results of a corpus study on fictive motion (the use of motion verbs to describe motionless scenes) in French, carried out to investigate some proposals made by Langacker, Matlock, Matsumoto, and Talmy regarding this topic. The 589 attested utterances collected show that fictive motion involves more verbs and entities than is generally assumed. The suggested explanations draw on Aurnague’s semantic analysis of motion verbs and Vandeloise’s account of the meaning of spatial markers in terms of force dynamics and functional properties. The phenomenon is also analyzed in its discursive context, with a presentation of some properties of the “discourse mode” in which fictive motion expressions appear.
In the last few decades there have been several attempts to connect language use with cognitive mechanisms underlying event representation. This language-thought interface is difficult to capture and highly debated. This chapter provides an overview of empirical and experimental studies relevant to this debate, focusing on the relation between eye movements, categorization and linguistic variation in the domain of motion events. It raises theoretical and methodological questions that have important implications for linguistic typology and cognitive studies more generally.
This chapter contributes to the present discussion about the expression of motion in French by presenting a psycholinguistic study that focuses on how information about motion is structured not only in speech but also in co-speech gesture. Interested in developmental and cross-linguistic perspectives, we included adults as well as 5- and 10-year-old children and compared French with a typologically different and less commonly studied language – Czech. Using data from narrations of short video clips featuring various motion events, we found that, in French, gestural expression of motion is organized more similarly to verbal expression of motion than in Czech. We also observed an age-related increasing tendency to include more information about motion into fewer clauses and gestural strokes.
This chapter deals with the automated formal analysis of a specfic interpretation of fictive motion named the “virtual traveler”, involved for instance in the French equivalents of a sentence like The path descends for two hours where it is possible that no-one actually descends. Our analysis in computational semantics yields the intended logical formula in the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory. It relies on a framework, the Montagovian Generative Lexicon that integrates lexical semantics into compositional semantics.
The backbone of the proposal in this chapter is an automatic parser and a formal encoder of information describing places, spatial and verbal relations in textual documents in order to reconstruct and map the textually described itinerary. These tools allow us to show how to combine the information expressed in French texts, referring to places, spatial actions associated with them, and data found in external geographical resources to build a geocoded representation of an itinerary. Our approach focuses on the automatic reconstruction of routes and transcribes them in their geographical setting, identifying locations and routes by interpreting spatial information in a dynamic space context.