Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description


Book Description

The idea of this book on "Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description" comes from the observation that, over the last 30 years, much attention has been devoted to the manner/path divide in relation to the distinction between Verb-Framed and Satellite-Framed languages. This mainstream focus has left aside other aspects of motion event descriptions. The chapters of this volume take an in-depth look at three less-studied aspects of motion expression. The first part of the book focuses on directional deixis, especially in relation to associated motion and visual motion. The second part explores variations in Source-Goal asymmetries. The third part investigates different types of motion event constructions, e.g., with various types of co-events. Many languages are taken into consideration throughout the 11 chapters, which gives the volume a clear typological dimension. This book is intended for students and academics interested in motion, spatial semantics, typological variation and cognitive linguistics.




Variation and Change in the Encoding of Motion Events


Book Description

The linguistic typology of motion event encoding is one of the central topics in Cognitive Linguistics. A vast body of typological, contrastive, and psycholinguistic research has shown the potential, but also the limitations of the original distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. This volume contains ten original papers focusing specifically on the variation and change of motion event encoding in individual languages and language families. The authors show that some of the central claims about motion event encoding need careful re-examination and reformulation and that individual languages and language families are more variable across space and time than even a refined typology could neatly capture at this time. The volume thus contributes to a more detailed and fine-grained foundation for the investigation of conceptual causes and consequences of different motion-event encoding strategies.




The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology


Book Description

Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.




Broader Perspectives on Motion Event Descriptions


Book Description

Human languages exhibit fascinating commonalities and variations in the ways they describe motion events. In this volume, the contributors present their research results concerning motion event descriptions in the languages that they investigate. The volume features new proposals based on a broad range of data involving different kinds of motion events previously understudied, such as caused motion (e.g., kick a ball across) and even visual motion (e.g., look into a hole). Special attention is also paid to deixis, a hitherto neglected aspect of motion event descriptions. A wide range of languages is examined, including those spoken in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The results provide new insights into the patterns languages deploy to represent motion events. This volume will appeal to anyone interested in language universals and typology, as well as the relationship between language and thought.




The Typology of Motion Events


Book Description

This comprehensive study concentrates particularly on the use of a closed set of motion verbs in five of the major dialects, including Mandarin, Wú, Hakka, Min and Cantonese. The author shows that these dialects form a continuum with some exhibiting more characteristics of a verb-framed language than the others. The phenomenon reflects the various stages of typological transformation and grammaticalization that the dialects have undergone.




Talking about Motion


Book Description

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Motion and Space across Languages


Book Description

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion, the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies, the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive, metaphorical) motion, and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition, translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation, experimentation, and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all, this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.




Associated Motion


Book Description

This volume is the first book-length presentation of the grammatical category of Associated Motion. It provides a framework for understanding a grammatical phenomenon which, though present in many languages, has gone unrecognized until recently. Previously known primarily from languages of Australia and South America, grammatical AM marking has now been identified in languages from most parts of the world (except Europe) and is becoming an important topic in linguistic typology. The chapters provide a thorough introduction to the subject, discussion of the relation between AM and related grammatical concepts, detailed descriptions of AM in a wide range of the world’s languages, and surveys of AM in particular language families and areas.




Spatial Cognition VIII


Book Description

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, SC 2012, held in Kloster Seeon, Germany, in August/September 2012. The 31 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The conference deals with spatial cognition, biological inspired systems, spatial learning, communication, robotics, and perception.




Cognitive Linguistics and Lexical Change


Book Description

This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.