Motion and the English Verb

Abstract

This book is a study of how motion is expressed in medieval English. It provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. It shows that also several non-motion verbs can receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition to this type-based analysis, the book also focuses on which verbs and structures are frequent in talking about motion: It analyses motion expression in selected Old and Middle English texts, showing that while satellite-framing is stable, the degree of manner-conflation is strongly influenced by text type and style. After establishing the satellite-framing, manner-salient nature of medieval English, the book investigates how in the intertypological contact situation with medieval French, a range of French path verbs (entrer, issir, descendre, etc.) are borrowed into Middle English, in whose system of motion encoding they can be seen ‘semantic misfits’. The various cognitive and contact-linguistic aspects of their integration into Middle English are investigated in an innovative approach of analysing their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. It shows that initially these verbs are borrowed not primarily for expressing general literal motion, but in more specific, often metaphorical and abstract contexts. The book is therefore both a diachronic contribution to the typology of motion encoding and to research on the process of borrowing and loanword integration.