[Lingtyp] motion verbs

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Christian — Two things. First, if there’s an empirically measurable sense of ‘(proto)typical’ in which ‘walk’ is a less typical instance of a concept that is focally instantiated by ‘go’, I doubt that (proto)typicality in that sense would be useful for purposes of language description or typology. Wouldn’t such a classification be similar to saying that cats are atypical dogs or vice versa? One could certainly do that, but what would be the point?

Secondly, ’translational motion’ seems to be fraught with deceptive similarity of its own, though in a different way. I have argued that Yucatec doesn’t express translational motion at all, only change of location:

Bohnemeyer, J. (2010). The language-specificity of Conceptual Structure: Path, Fictive Motion, and time relations. In B. Malt & P. Wolff (Eds.), Words and the mind: How words capture human experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 111-137.

Bohnemeyer, J. (2013). The language-specificity of Conceptual Structure: Taking stock. International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics 4(1): 65-88.

Best — Juergen

> On Jun 6, 2022, at 1:09 PM, Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:
> 
> Dear Sergey and Jürgen,
> 
> it seems that most of us have used the term 'motion verb' to mean 'verb of translocation/translational motion' and, moreover, as a prototypical concept. It has a focal instance, viz. 'go', which we assume has a counterpart in most languages. And while there is wide agreement on the focal instance, the expansion of the core notion in different directions and its delimitation against neighboring notions is a matter of epistemic interest. One path of expansion would be: "'go' and other verbs which share a similar distribution or are in the same paradigm as 'go'. But such expansions are a matter of definition. It is, for instance, a matter of definition whether your descriptive or typological study of motion verbs covers verbs like 'dance' and 'turn'.
> 
> Cheers, Christian
> 
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-- 
Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo 

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