title: Does the road go up the mountain? Fictive motion between linguistic conventions and cognitive motivations.
abstract: Fictive motion (FM) characterizes the use of dynamic expressions to describe static scenes. This phenomenon is crucial in terms of cognitive motivations for language use; several explanations have been proposed to account for it, among which mental simulation (Talmy in Toward a cognitive semantics, vol 1. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000) and visual scanning (Matlock in Studies in linguistic motivation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp 221-248, 2004a). The aims of this paper were to test these competing explanations and identify language-specific constraints. To do this, we compared the linguistic strategies for expressing several types of static configurations in four languages, French, Italian, German and Serbian, with an experimental set-up (59 participants). The experiment yielded significant differences for motion-affordance versus no motion-affordance, for all four languages. Significant differences between languages included mean frequency of FM expressions. In order to refine the picture, and more specifically to disentangle the respective roles of language-specific conventions and language-independent (i.e. possibly cognitive) motivations, we completed our study with a corpus approach (besides the four initial languages, we added English and Polish). The corpus study showed low frequency of FM across languages, but a higher frequency and translation ratio for some FM types--among which those best accounted for by enactive perception. The importance of enactive perception could thus explain both the universality of FM and the fact that language-specific conventions appear mainly in very specific contexts--the ones furthest from enaction.
authors.affiliation: CLLE-ERSS, CNRS, University of Toulouse 2, Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Dejan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Stosic
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fagard
authors.forename: Laure
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Sarda
authors.forename: Camille
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Colin
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology*