NOELIA JIMÉNEZ MARTÍNEZ-LOSA

Universidad de La Rioja

Towards a typology of fictive motion events: review of existing proposals and presentation of new perspectives

Semántica y Lexicología / Semantics and Lexicology

The study of the conceptual domain of motion has been a central issue within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics from its early beginning. Some of these theories pay attention to literal or factive motion (Slobin 1996, Talmy 2000, Ibarretxe 2003), some others to fictive motion (Talmy 2000, Matlock 2004), and some others to metaphorical motion (Johnson 1987, Lakoff and Johnson 1999, Radden 1996, Özçaliskan 2005, Baicchi 2005). These theories are, in most cases, partial theories which only focus on a specific aspect of this conceptual domain, and the metaphoric, metonymic, and image-schematic structure of this conceptual domain has not been properly treated.

This paper focuses on a specific subtype of motion, known in the field as fictive motion (e.g. The fence goes from the plateau to the valley). In our analysis of fictive motion events we discovered that the MOTION metaphor, in combination with metonymy and image-schemas, underlies the semantic configuration of fictive motion events. Taking these ideas as a starting point, our analysis of the corpus also allowed us to revise the existing typologies of fictive motion events (Matlock 2004).

The analysis of the examples of our corpus enabled us to prove that the previous typologies of fictive motion constructions are not accurate, since they do not account properly for the linguistic realization of fictive motion events. We argue that the distinction between bare motion verbs (e.g. go, move) and manner motion verbs (e.g. crawl, run) is not a determinant factor in the establishment of such a typology, since both types of verbs can appear in both types of fictive motion constructions (e.g. The highway crawls through the city; The fish pond runs along the fence). In our proposal we depart from these assumptions and we propose a typology of fictive motion events based on the number of arguments that the verb may take. We also claim that the role of the metonymy MOTION ALONG THE PATH FOR PATH is not restricted to a specific type of fictive motion construction. This metonymy, in combination with metaphor and image-schemas, has a pervasive role in the semantic configuration of fictive motion vents, and it is described as a subcase of the high-level metonymy ACTION FOR RESULT (Ruiz de Mendoza and Pérez 2001).




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