The Linguistic Expression of Motion in Language

Abstract

This chapter reviews the concept of motion in language as a recurrent topic in human communication. Some theoretical positions from cognitive semantics postulate that, across languages, speakers lexicalize motion using lexico-syntactic constructions that emphasize different aspects of the event. In this sense, motion events are a fertile area in which to explore how learners acquire and produce form-meaning mappings to describe motion in a second language. Drawing on Talmy’s (Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring, 2000) classification, English and Spanish have been the source of numerous studies as they are said to represent different language typologies. Findings in oral production indicate that, although the two languages overlap in some lexicalization patterns, their main trends differ. English speakers tend to lexicalize the manner (e.g., run) in the main verb (i.e., to focus on the internal mechanism of motion), whereas Spanish speakers tend to lexicalize the path (e.g., entrar ‘enter’), and focus on the trajectory of an entity in motion. Anglophones need to learn the central tendency of Spanish in order to package motion events in a way that is idiomatically correct. Talmy’s proposal also guides my analysis of the motion-event descriptions collected from the receptive and production tasks participants completed in the study reported in this book. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three stages of acquisition that Anglophones need to master in order to talk about motion idiomatically in line with Spanish.