“The Ridge Went North”: Did the Observer Go as Well? Corpus-driven Investigation of Fictive Motion

Abstract

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings “The Ridge Went North”: Did the Observer Go as Well? Corpus-driven Investigation of Fictive Motion E. Egorova 1,2 , G. Boo 1 , R.S. Purves 1 Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Email: {ekaterina.egorova, gianluca.boo, ross.purves}@geo.uzh.ch University Priority Research Programme Language and Space (URPP SpuR), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Abstract Fictive motion (“The ridge went north”) can refer to both dynamic (observer is moving) and static (observer is visually scanning) scenes. Using a corpus of alpine narratives, we extract fictive motion constructions and compare those representing static and dynamic scenes. According to our findings, some of the verbs appear exclusively in static (or dynamic) scenes, while others can be found in both and thus require broader context for the correct annotation. The results can be seen as a step towards the automatic identification of the role of geographic objects in text. 1. Introduction Text corpora are increasingly being recognised as a potential source of rich geographic information. However, extracting information from text requires understanding of the ways in which language encodes space (Talmy 2000) and the scope of spatial information reproduced in certain discourse. Thus, route descriptions have been shown to go well beyond straightforward references to displacement through the prototypical go and turn (Allen 2000; Denis 1997; Tversky and Lee 1991) and include instructions of positioning and inspection (Allen 2000; Moncla et al. 2015), exercising caution or remembering a certain geographic object (Egorova et al. 2015), as well as topological information (Denis 1997). An important task in automatic route extraction from text is thus differentiating whether a geographic object is introduced as an element of the actual path or in some other context (e.g. description of a vista at some point of a path). One approach to making this distinction uses verb semantics, where a verb of perception signals description of the geographic object as part of a scene, while a verb of motion indicates movement of the observer with regard to that object. (Moncla et al. 2015). From this perspective, fictive motion (FM) is of central importance. It depicts “the form, orientation, or location of a spatially extended object in terms of a path over the object's extent” (Talmy 2000) and reflects the conceptual primacy of named objects and their configuration in physical space (Matlock and Bergmann 2014; Matsumoto 1996). Crucially, it can take one of the two forms (Langacker 2010; Matsumoto 1996). The first (static) construes the scene as static, observable from a specific point in space, its conceptual roots lying in visual, or mental, scanning by an observer along the feature (“The path rises quickly near the top.” (Langacker 2010)). The second (dynamic) encodes the actual motion of the observer, where the series of immediate fields of view along their path are construed as a single entity moving through space itself (“The path is rising quickly as we climb.” (Langacker 2010)). Distinguishing between these forms is important, since one encodes the movement of the observer, while the other describes the configuration of an object in space. In this study, we explore FM in a corpus of alpine texts addressing the following questions: • Which verbs are used in FM constructions in our corpus?