Does the road go up the mountain ? Fictive motion between linguistic conventions and cognitive motivations - Langues, textes, traitement informatique, cognition Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Cognitive Processing Année : 2015

Does the road go up the mountain ? Fictive motion between linguistic conventions and cognitive motivations

Résumé

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 languagespecific constraints. To do this, we compared the linguisticstrategies 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.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
2015_Stosic-etal-Does-the-road.pdf (949.99 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte

Dates et versions

hal-01458753 , version 1 (21-09-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01458753 , version 1

Citer

Dejan Stosic, Benjamin Fagard, Laure Sarda, Camille Colin. Does the road go up the mountain ? Fictive motion between linguistic conventions and cognitive motivations. Cognitive Processing, 2015, 16 (Suppl 1), pp.S221-S225. ⟨hal-01458753⟩
27 Consultations
48 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More