The goal bias revisited: A collostructional approach

Abstract

Abstract There is a goal bias in the description of motion events: adverbials specifying goals are preferred over adverbials specifying source. Two broad explanations have been suggested to account for this: first, a general cognitive bias towards the aims of human actions, and second, the higher information value of goal adverbials in conceptualizing a motion event in its entirety. The second explanation predicts that the goal bias should be verb-specific. In particular, verbs whose lexical semantics focus on trajectories or sources of motion events (such as stroll and escape respectively), should not display a goal bias but instead prefer adverbials corresponding to this focus. Stefanowitsch and Rohde (2004) present case studies of ten English motion verbs that confirm this prediction. The current study takes up this research and complements it with a collostructional analysis over a large sample of 248 English motion verbs. The study shows, first, that goal adverbials dominate among strongly-associated pairs of motion verbs and prepositions in the English Intransitive Motion Construction, confirming a general goal bias for this construction; and second, that while goal adverbials are significantly associated with generic motion verbs as well as motion verbs specifying trajectories, trajectory adverbials and goal adverbials are significantly associated with trajectory- and goal-oriented verbs respectively, adding largescale quantitative confirmation to the previous study.