Description

Mixel Aurnague (CNRS): "A semantic framework for the analysis of motion expression in French: an overview"

May 15th, 2024. 3:00 pm.

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 4.

Abstract

This contribution will trace the main outlines of a framework developed the last decade (see Aurnague 2011) in order to scrutinize the expression of motion eventualities in French. The notions of change of placement and change of basic locative relation (Boons 1987) used for analyzing motion eventualities will first be recalled, as well as the categories of verbs and situations that follow from their interaction. This conceptual apparatus leads to subdivide the movement and motion domain into two macro-categories and four basic categories of verbs and eventualities/situations.

The presentation will then focus on the macro-category of “motion/displacement in the broad sense” and will review the basic categories of “motion in the weak sense” (simple change of placement) and “strict motion” (change of relation and placement) included in this macro-category. Subcategories will be also distinguished within these basic categories. The theoretical framework makes possible to arrange the verbs along a continuum of dynamicity (vs. staticness) that, in particular, illustrates how important the concept of “update of location” is for the movement and motion domain.

The conclusion of the talk will sum up the framework's main features and will raise the possibility of proposing an alternative to the typology of motion in language(s) in terms of path vs. manner (Talmy 1985, 2000). Finally, this investigation on the expression of dynamic space in French (and beyond) will be resituated within the research program Defdép(l) ("Description, experimentation and formalization of motion/displacement (in language)") developed from 2011 onwards.

References

Aurnague, M. (2011). How motion verbs are spatial: the spatial foundations of intransitive motion verbs in French. Lingvisticae Investigationes, 34(1), 1-34.

Boons, J.P. (1987). La notion sémantique de déplacement dans une classification syntaxique des verbes locatifs. Langue Française, 76, 5-40.

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (vol. 3): grammatical categories and the lexicon (pp. 57-149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics (vol. I & II). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.