2. For many linguists and cognitive psychologists, motion plays a special role
in human thinking.
Linguists naturally expect all languages to have ways of talking about
motion and ways of describing different kinds of motion.
Introduction
3. The psychologists Miller and Johnson-Laird call motion verbs 'the most characteristically verbal of
all the verbs' and the 'purest and most prototypical of verbs’.
The logical extension of this view is LOCALISM.
This is the hypothesis that motion provides the cognitive framework for more abstract domains of
meaning such as possession, communication, and transformation.
In apparent support of this, there is the fact that English 'motional' prepositions such as to and from
can be used in these other domains.
For instance, we speak of taking or hearing of something from someone; of giving or saying
something to someone; and of traffic lights changing from red to green.
Comparable facts are common in the world's languages. Many prominent semanticists, including Ray
Jackendoff and Ronald Langacker, subscribe to a version of localism.
4. The popularity or localism is one good reason for us to inquire into the semantics of motion and of
movement generally.
For despite the fact that all languages have ways of describing motion, there are fascinating
differences in how they go about it.
We will see that even words as apparently simple as come and go do not have straightforward
equivalents in some languages.
6. The nature of motion, and in particular its relationship with location and time, has
concerned thinkers from the earliest days of philosophy.
Though we can't dwell on the classical theories here, it is thought-provoking to consider
one of the famous 'paradoxes' of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea.
The paradox of the flying arrow assumes the common sense idea that motion is a
continuous change of location.
A flying arrow, on this view, is in a different location at every moment of its flight. But if
so, it must be at rest at every moment, and if it is always at rest, when does it move?
Pre-modern Analyses
7. Over the centuries many solutions have been proposed to this brainteaser, most recently
drawing on sophisticated mathematical concepts about infinite series and infinite sets.
From a semantic point of view, one feels that since the paradox is framed in terms of
ordinary concepts it ought to be possible to escape it while remaining within the realm of
ordinary concepts.
In this respect, Aristotle's answer to Zeno has something to offer.
8. His reply was that time is not truly composed of 'nows' (of moments), and that what may be
true at a moment is not necessarily true over a period.
According to Aristotle, it is not surprising that 'moments' are not attended by motion
because one of the necessary attributes of motion is duration.
9. In the seventeenth century, a time of intense interest and inquiry into the fundamentals
of thought and knowledge, John Locke and Gottlieb Wilhelm Leibniz held contrary views
on the status of motion.
In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke recognized the dependence of
the concept of motion on that of space, but still maintained that they were 'very distinct
ideas. .. Motion can neither be nor be conceived without space, and yet motion is not
space nor space motion.’
In one famous passage, he criticized those who attempt to define simple ideas, using
motion as an example. In his critique of Locke, Leibniz took the opposite view.
10. ‘’The atomists, who define motion to be a passage from one place to another, what do they
do more than put one synonymous word for another? For what is passage other than
motion? And if they were asked what passage was, how would they better define it than by
motion? For is it not at least as proper and significant to say passage is a motion from one
place to another as to say motion is a passage, etc, This is to translate and not to define.’’
(Locke 1976 [1690]: 221—2)
“You treat as simple many ideas which are not so. Motion is one of them. I believe it to be
definable, and the definition which says it is change of place deserves respect.” (Leibniz
1981 [1765]: 111. iv. 297)
11. Actually, Locke himself sometimes writes as if he thinks motion is definable.
For example, at one point he designates 'distance' as a 'mode of space', and then speaks of
'motion being nothing but the change of distance between any two things’.
Of course, to analyse motion as 'change of place' (or of distance) requires us to assume that
change is the 'prior and more intelligible' notion. Leibniz believed that change was a simple
and indefinable idea, but this is by no means an obvious proposition.
In fact, on purely Intuitive grounds the words go and move would strike most people as
simpler than change, and children no doubt start using the words go and move well before
they use change.
13. Some of the most influential modern linguistic work on motion has been done by Leonard
Talmy.
Talmy (1985a; 2007) identified four basic components of what he called a 'basic motion event’.
The basic motion event consists of one object (the 'FIGURE') moving or located with respect to
another object (the reference-object or 'GROUND’).
It is analysed as having four components: besides 'Figure' and 'Ground' there are 'PATH' and
'Motion’.
The 'Path’ : is the course followed or the site occupied by the Figure object with respect to the
Ground object.
'Motion’ : refers to the presence per se in the event of motion or location. .. We will represent
motion by the form 'move' and location by ‘beL' (for 'be located’).
14. Notice that Talmy treats maintenance of a stationary location as a kind of 'motion event',
and many other contemporary linguists follow him in this use of terminology.
The motivation for it is that the predicates 'move' and 'be located' can both be seen as
fitting into the same 'Figure—Ground— Path' conceptual schema.
One difference is that where motion is involved, there can be two Grounds, normally
referred to as SOURCE (the origin point of the motion) and GOAL (the destination point of
the motion).
15. The following examples show how these terms are applied. Notice that the term THEME is
commonly used in place of Talmy's 'Figure' to designate something which moves.
a. Max travelled from Sydney to Melbourne via Canberra.
Figure/ Source Goal Path
Theme
b. The ball rolled down the hill.
Figure/ Path
Theme
c. We approached the village.
Figure/ Goal
Theme
16. c. We approached the village.
Figure/ Goal
Theme
As you can see from example (c), a goal is not always indicated by a preposition or other
morphological marking, but can be implied by the meaning of the verb.
Approach is a transitive verb which requires a grammatical object indicating the goal.
Similarly, leave requires a source.
17. In English, the path component is usually indicated by a prepositional phrase or an adverb (such
as over or along), but there are some verbs whose meanings include a specification about the
path taken.
For example, the verbs enter and return imply the same kind of paths as the expressions go in
and go back.
This phenomenon is commonly called LEXICAL CONFLATION.
Thus, you will see verbs like approach and enter described as 'conflating’ i.e. combining, motion
and ground (specifically goal), and motion and path, respectively.
18. In addition to the components mentioned so far, motion events can also have a 'manner' or
a 'cause' specification.
Many English motion verbs, encode manner, that is, the way the motion is carried out
as in the example :
a. I walked/ran/rushed down the stairs.
b. The rock slid/rolled/bounced down the hill.
19. Movement from place to place is a necessary part of the inherent meaning of the verbs in (
walked, ran, and rushed).
As Talmy (1985a) points out, however, the verbs (slid, rolled, and bounced) can all be used
without any such implication.
For instance, one could say
• I slid on the ice
• I rolled the blanket up
• The ball' bounced twice
without implying that I, the blanket, or the ball moved along any path of motion.
There is a very general pattern in English whereby a verb is interpret as involving motion (as
well as its primary meaning) when it is combined with a path expression.
20. Two other examples of this are
• She wore a green dress to the party
• ('she went to the party, wearing a green dress’)
• I read comics all the way to New York
• ('I went to New York, reading comics all the way’).
Talmy has shown that languages often seem to have preferred LEXICALIZATION PATTERNS.
21. Many of Talmy's ideas have been adapted into the treatment of motion developed by Ray
Jackendoff within his theory of 'conceptual semantics’.
Jackendoff (1990) adopted GO and BE as 'basic conceptual functions' with the argument structures
shown below.
Notice that Jackendoff included Path as one of his major 'ontological categories' or conceptual
'parts of speech' (along with Place, Event, State ,and others).
[Event GO ([ ], )]: The bird went from the ground to the tree.
[State BE ([ ], [Place ])]: The bird is in the tree.
FROM ([ ])
Path TO ([ ])
[ ]
22. To account for the fact that be-sentences expresses the end-state of the corresponding go-
sentence, Jackendoff (1990) postulated a ‘rule of inference’:
At the termination of [Event GO ([X], [Path TO ([Y])])], it is the case that [State BE ([X], [Place AT
([Y])])].
23. Many linguists subscribe to a version of 'localism’. Jackendoff explains as follows:
The basic insight of this theory is that the formalism for encoding concepts of spatial location
and motion, suitably abstracted, can be generalized to many other semantic fields. The standard
evidence for this claim is the fact that many verbs and prepositions appear in two or more
semantic fields, forming intuitively related paradigms.
(Jackendoff 1990: 25)
24. As examples of this last claim, there are go-sentences and be-sentences about possession like (a)
and (b) below, and about the ascription of properties, like (c) and (d) below
a. The inheritance went to Phillip. Go-sentence
b. The money is Phillip’s. Be-sentence
c. The lights went from green to red. Go-sentence
d. The light is red. Be-sentence
25. After enumerating these and other similar examples, Jackendoff (1990: 26) remarks: 'One has
the sense, then, that this variety of uses is not accidental.’
His solution is to regard GO and BE as designating abstract meanings, not specifically tied to
their motional or locational uses.
The spatial vs. possessional vs. identificational meaning is to be indicated by a 'semantic field
feature', notated as a subscript on the function, which 'designates the field in which the Event
or State is defined’.
Thus, we have GOSpatial (also represented simply as GO), GOposs and GOIdent, and BEspatial,
BEPoss and BEIdent. Jackendoff's claim is that the three semantic fields have parallel
conceptual structure.
'This notation captures the lexical parallelisms. .. neatly' (1990: 26).
26. Jackendoff also considers motion verbs like wiggle, wriggle, dance, spin, and wave, which do not
imply traversal of any Path, but he declines the challenge of describing the semantic differences
between them.
Most 'manner of motion' properties, he writes, are 'not the business of conceptual structure at
all' (1990: 88), but instead belong to spatial-visual representation.
This means that all verbs which depict merely 'the internal motion of the subject’ with no
implications with respect to their location, change of location or configuration with respect to
any other object' can be assigned a single conceptual structure, which he represents as follows:
[Event MOVE ([Thing ])]
Goddard,2011
Cont,
27. From the point of view of NSM semantics, the concept of 'abstract motion' confuses, rather than
simplifies, the job of semantic description and explanation.
Jackendoff's (1990) subscripting manoeuvre (distinguishing GOspatial, GOposs, and GOIdent),
for instance, may be a concise method of describing the claimed parallelism between location,
possession, and ascription, but it can hardly be said to explain anything.
Further, as we saw earlier 'abstracting' the meanings of GO and BE makes the semantic
representations more remote from ordinary language, and therefore less susceptible to
disconfirmation by reference to the facts of ordinary usage.
28. It could also be pointed out that having GO, BE, and MOVE as distinct conceptual primitives makes
it difficult to explain the interconnectedness between them.
Jackendoff (1996) develops a more logically satisfying account, but at the cost of making the
representations even more abstract and algebriac, and even less verifiable and cognitively
plausible.
30. How can the NSM metalanguage be used to deal with notions such as source, goal, and
different types of path?
The semantic primes necessary for explicating motion-related concepts constitute a rather rich
set, including a variety of spatial and temporal elements in addition to the posited
'fundamental' predicate of motion MOVE.
It is easy to see that the locational prime BE SOMEWHERE (BE IN A PLACE), the element THIS,
and the concepts of BEFORE and AFTER are all required.
As Fillmore (1983: 217) once remarked, 'linear motion or locomotion' is distinguished from
other types of motion such as spinning or vibrating precisely by the fact that 'the thing started
out at one place at one time and ended up at another place at a later time'.
31. To explicate even relatively simple path-expressions such as towards and away from, it is
necessary also to make use of the durational prime FOR SOME TIME, the spatial elements
NEAR and FAR, and the conditional IF.
Other path-expressions call for other spatial elements—up (wards) and down(wards) involve
ABOVE and BELOW; into involves INSIDE, and across involves the laterality prime ON ONE
SIDE.
Many expressions to do with 'manner of motion', notably speed words like quickly and slowly,
rely on the 'relative time period' primes A SHORT TIME and A LONG TIME, as well as other
elements.
All in all, one could say that NSM analyses of motion are more elaborate than most other
current approaches, but that the pay-off is a far better articulation of the relationships
between motion, Space, and time.
32. The NSM approach to source and goal can be illustrated by reference to the following
schema for ‘translational motion’:
Something X moved from place A to place B:
something X moved for some time
before this, it was somewhere (place A)
after this, it was somewhere else (place B)
33. In other words, a so-called 'source' refers to the place where something was before it moved and
'goal' to another place, where it is after the movement is over.
Motion of this kind is depicted as necessarily implying a period of duration.
The schema also gives a clue as to why parallelisms between motion and transformation are so
common—transformation has the same 'before-after structure as motion. For example, The
traffic lights changed from red to green means something like:
'something happened; before this the traffic lights were red, after this they were green.’
34. The following explication shows the meaning of the directional (i.e. path-like) expression towards:
Something X is moving towards A:
something X is moving
if it moves in the same way for some time more, after this it will be near A
Notice that towards is linked with the concept of nearness, not with that of arrival (i.e. being at
A).
This allows for the fact that I can say something is moving towards A without implying that I
think it will (or would, if it keeps going) necessarily pass through A's exact location.
Of course, the term NEAR is inherently vague—just what distance qualifies as NEAR is a
subjective matter.
This is as it should be, since the same kind of vagueness characterizes towards also.
35. A final observation is that the explication implies that it would not make sense to speak of
someone or something moving towards A if it were already unambiguously near A.
Again this seems the correct result.
There is nothing odd about saying:
Sally sat down some distance from Harry then she started moving towards
But it does sound odd to say that
She sat down near Harry, then started moving towards him
(though She started moving closer to him is quite OK).
36. The comparable explication for away from is straightforward:
Something X is moving away from A:
something X is moving
if it moves in the same way for some time more, after this it will be far from A
In English, the verbs go and come are no doubt a lot more common than MOVE, and it may be
wondered why go, for example, has not been chosen to represent motion rather than MOVE.
One reason has already been mentioned, namely; the desirability of linking translational motion
(moving from place to place) with other types of motion which don't imply any change of location
(such as wiggling and waving).
As a motion verb, go is confined to translational movement.
Another reason to prefer MOVE is that the situation with go is not nearly as straightforward as it
might seem at first.
38. The heading of this section is borrowed from the title of an article by Charles Fillmore (1983),
one of a string of papers in which he teases out various subtleties in the meaning and usage of
English come and go.
Although one often sees come described as meaning 'motion-towards-speaker' and go as
'motion-away-from-speaker' (or 'motion-not-towards-speaker’). We will see that neither verb is
as simple as this.
39. In Jackendoff (1990), 'abstract GOspatial' is predicated of all sorts of things—people,
inanimate objects and natural forces alike.
But ordinary English go is not like that.
It sounds perfectly normal to speak of people and animals going from one place to
another, but there is something curious and faintly childlike about using go about an
inanimate object.
The boys are going down to the river
The horses are going down to the river
The clouds are going across the sky.
The rock is going down the hill.
The Meaning of Go
40. Go is an extremely polysemous word, however, and for this effect to emerge clearly we
must confine ourselves to its motional sense.
In particular, we must exclude the use of the participial adjective gone as in:
It's gone
This can apply to anything, living or non-living
The rock was gone, The clouds were gone
But with no implication that the thing moved itself, so to speak.
With this caveat in mind we can say that, motional go in ordinary English is confined to an
animate being DOING something.
41. Two other interesting properties of go are as follows:
On the one hand, it can combine directly with an indefinite or interrogative location word
Indicating a goal
She went somewhere, or Where are you going?
Without the need for any prepositional to-phrase, which seems to imply that the idea of
being somewhere is very closely tied in with the meaning of go.
42. On the other hand, it seems more focused on leaving or 'moving on' than on the possibility
of arriving anywhere.
For example, one can say
She went yesterday
without implying that she has arrived anywhere, and it is quite possible to think of someone
just going along without having to think of any particular destination that the person may
have in mind.
43. To a large extent, this paradox can be resolved by the following explication.
Someone X went (yesterday):
someone X did something for some time (yesterday)
because of this, this someone moved during this time
before this, this someone was somewhere
after this, because of this, this someone wasn't in this place anymore, this
someone was somewhere else
44. Interestingly, the situation changes a bit when a to-phrase is added.
Saying She went to the shops implies that she has arrived there, as can be seen from the
oddity of She went to the shops but she hasn't got there yet.
The explication below applies to the case where a to-phrase and a from-phrase are both
present.
Someone X went from A to B (yesterday):
someone X did something for some time (yesterday)
because of this, this someone moved during this time
before this, this someone was in place A
after this, because of this, this someone wasn't in this place anymore, this
someone was in place B
Notice that this explication incorporates components which constitute the explication for X
moved from A to B , consistent with the fact that X went from A to B entails X moved from A to
B.
