Fictive Motion in English: An Elicitation Experiment
-
Authors:
Diego Caroca* Huili Wang and Hanning Guo / Language and Cognitive Science / 2018,4(1): 79−99 / 2018-08-26
- Keywords: cross-linguistic investigation; dynamism; embodiment; enactive perception
- Abstract: After Talmy’s (1983) seminal work, fictive motion sentences have received much attention in cognitive- and psychological-oriented linguistic studies. The reason for such interest lies in the rather paradoxical semantic phenomenon that fictive motion sentences exhibit: in them, verbs of motion are used to describe a static scene. Proponents of embodied theories of language comprehension see in this kind of expression a paradigmatic example of how linguistic meaning is determined by embodied cognitive mechanisms. However, these explanations tend to overlook important aspects of the linguistic realization of fictive motion dand reduce the phenomenon to a single cognitive motivation. Here, we replicate Blomberg’s (2014) picture elicitation experiment of fictive motion expressions in French, Thai, and Swedish for English in order to confirm to what extent these languages confirm the results of his investigation, namely, the bias towards dynamism of human cognition as one of the main motivational factors behind the use of fictive motion expressions (Talmy’s enactive perception hypothesis). Despite the fact that we were unable to replicate Blomberg’s main finding, our results still provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis of enactive perception and shows that the experiment design is suitable for further cross-linguistic investigation on fictive motion.
-
