Motion in Language and Experience : Actual and Non-actual motion in Swedish, French and Thai
Författare
Summary, in English
With respect to AM, an experiential taxonomy of motion situations with three independent parameters is
proposed. This taxonomy was used in an elicitation-based study with speakers of Swedish, French and Thai. The produced descriptions were analyzed according to the framework of Holistic Spatial Semantics, which assumes a set of semantic categories and claims that these are distributed across clauses and descriptions rather than being localized to a select few form classes, such as verbs and so-called satellites. The descriptions in the three languages conformed to the proposed universal semantic categories and the taxonomy of motion situations, at the same time as displaying language-specific properties. To differentiate between the different types of motion situations, the Swedish speakers used verbs, adverbs and prepositions, the French speakers mostly verbs and prepositions, and the Thai participants relied on serial-verb constructions. The speakers of the three languages also differed in the motion information typically expressed. For example, Swedish speakers tended to express both Manner and Path in the same clause; the French speakers focused on Path, and the Thai on Manner, Path and (viewpoint-centered) Direction.
For NAM, a re-interpretation of several well-known analyses in Cognitive Linguistics was proposed. This was
conducted in order to separate motivating experiences from conventional semantics and to study the interplay
between the two. Inspired by phenomenology, I propose that NAM-sentences are motivated by different kinds of experiences, including enactive perception, mental scanning and imagining. An elicitation-based study with pictures representing static linear extensions was conducted with speakers of the same three languages. All pictures followed a two-by-two design: the object either afforded human motion or did not (e.g. road vs. fence). The perspective was from a first-person point of view, as if standing on or next to the object, or that of a distant observer. For the three languages, all four picture types elicited NAM-descriptions, but mostly for the condition First-person+Afford motion. This showed that enactive perception is a potent motivation in the production of NAM-sentences. Even if the speakers behaved similarly in this respect, the descriptions conformed to the general patterns for expressing actual motion in the respective language, shown in the first part of the thesis.
Avdelning/ar
Publiceringsår
2014
Språk
Engelska
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Travaux de l'Institut de Linguistique de Lund
Volym
53
Fulltext
Dokumenttyp
Doktorsavhandling
Förlag
The Faculties of Humanities and Theology
Ämne
- Languages and Literature
Nyckelord
- motion situations
- non-actual motion
- Swedish
- elicitation
- cognitive linguistics
- phenomenology
- Thai
- French
- subjective motion
- fictive motion
- semantic typology
- motion
- spatial semantics
- motion events
Aktiv
Published
Handledare
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 0347-2558
- ISBN: 978-91-87833-01-4
Försvarsdatum
31 maj 2014
Försvarstid
10:00
Försvarsplats
Palaestras hörsal (övre), Paradisgatan 4, Lund
Opponent
- Ad Foolen (Associate Professor)