What is it about?

This volume take an in-depth look at three aspects of motion expression. The first part of the book focuses on directional deixis, i.e. the way languages express the orientation of motion towards or away from the speaker. The second part explores how languages encode information related to the source or goal of motion and to what extent this reflects the cognitive salience of the goal. The third part investigates different types of motion event constructions. 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.

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Why is it important?

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 has left out other aspects of describing motion events, such as deixis, asymmetries, and constructions, which are studied in detail in this book.

Perspectives

This book is an outgrowth of the "Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description" conferences, held in Paris in 2017, then in 2019 and 2021, and soon in Kyoto in 2022. We hope that the community of linguists interested in the expression of space and motion will find in these meetings a place for cumulative knowledge building in this area. There are still many unexplored aspects related to the expression of motion across languages. One of them that could be launched here, as an example, is the role of agentivity on the transitivity of structures used across languages. How notions of force, speed, and intentionality constrain structures and participate in the interpretation of events. How are these notions encoded? These are questions that, among many others, remain open for future research.

Laure Sarda
CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France)

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This page is a summary of: Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description, June 2022, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.72.
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