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              Verbs of motion and the expression of result.

                         Dissertation Proposal
    
                           Christine Poulin
          

In his ground-breaking work on lexicalization patterns, Talmy (1985)
presents a typology of motion verbs based on the category of
information that conflates with motion in the main verb, e.g., Path or
Manner. He finds that in one type of language, such as English, the
main verb typically encodes manner along with the fact of motion,
while the path (i.e., the general direction followed relative to the
ground) is expressed by elements associated with the verb ("I ran up
to the gym"). In contrast, in another type of language, such as
French, the main verb encodes the path along with the fact of motion,
and the manner is expressed by other elements such as gerundives ("Je
suis monte au gym en courant"). While Talmy talked mostly about
tendencies, subsequent work has focussed on claims about
well-formedness.  For example, Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1995) have
proposed that French-like languages can only use manner-of-motion
verbs to express motion within a location ("J'ai couru au gym" to mean
only `I ran at the gym', not `I ran to the gym').  Slobin and Hoiting
by contrast claim that French-like languages can express change of
location, but only if no boundaries are crossed ("J'ai couru jusqu'au
gym" means `I ran to the gym'; but "J'ai couru dans le gym" cannot
mean `I ran into the gym').

In this talk (based in part on earlier work with Vivienne Fong) I try
to sort out what is and is not grammatical in French, drawing on data
from many native speakers as well as a large corpus of written
sentences.  I present evidence that the relevant syntactic
constructions in French and English are essentially identical. Where
they differ is in the types of verbs that are associated with the
different semantic templates, which results in different syntactic
subcategorization.  In particular, English freely allows its verbs of
motion to undergo a template expansion that adds a BECOME (change of
state) predicate to the basic Activity template.  This option is not
available to French, and so it can express "motion to" only if the
verb or the preposition in question comes pre-equipped with a BECOME
predicate.  Therefore in French, sentences like "J'ai couru dans le
gym" are attested in the meaning `I ran into the gym', because the
verb is pre-equipped with a BECOME predicate; "J'ai nag vers la rive
droite" can mean `I swam towards the right bank' because the
preposition itself includes the BECOME predicate; but "J'ai nag dans
la caverne" can mean only `I swam within the cave', because no lexeme
has the BECOME predicate.  The analogous English sentence, `I swam in
the cave', can mean either `within' or `into', because of the
availability of template expansion within English. Among the evidence
that English verbs can undergo change-of-state template expansion is
that the syntactic structure that can be used for depictives ("They
burned the witch alive") can also be used for resultatives ("They
burned the witch dead"), which extension is unavailable in French.  I
will present results from a pilot study that indicates that this
connection between the behavior of motion verbs and resultatives is
not accidental but holds up cross-linguistically. I will also seek
feedback for a proposal to investigate the semantic factors that
determine which manner-of-motion verbs are associated with BECOME
predicates in French-like languages; and ideas for a historical
investigation of how Latin changed from an English-like language
(i.e., with template expansion) to a French-like language.


References:

   Rappaport Hovav, Malka and Beth Levin. 1995. Morphology and lexical
semantics. To appear in A. Zwicky and A. Spencer (eds), Handbook of
morphology. Oxford: Blackwell.

   Slobin, Dan and Nini Hoiting. 1994. Reference to movement in
spoken and signed languages: typological considerations In Proceedings
of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley.  Linguistic Society, 20,
487-505.

   Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalisation patterns: Semantic structure in
lexical forms. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic
description, Vol. 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon,
57-149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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