Premium
MOTION AND EXTENT: TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
Author(s) -
Iwata Seizi
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.1996.tb00351.x
Subject(s) - sentence , motion (physics) , metaphor , schema (genetic algorithms) , transition (genetics) , linguistics , identity (music) , mathematics , computer science , physics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , information retrieval , biochemistry , chemistry , gene , acoustics
. This paper examines the relationship between a motion sentence (e.g, Amy went from Denver to Indianapolis .) and an extent sentence (e.g., The road goes from Denver to Indianapolis .), building upon Jackendoft's (1983) analysis. It is shown that the semantic functions for motion and extent senses, respectively GO and GO Exl , are distinct, but that they share a great deal of internal structure. While both functions express successive transition from one component state to the next, they differ in (a) the presence vs. absence of the passage of time, and (b) the identity of the mover through transition. The analysis presented here based on semantic functions comes closer to an overall characterization of the motion/extent contrast than the image‐schema‐based approach (Lakoff 1987) or the metaphor‐based approach (Lakoff & Turner 1989). It can also be easily extended to account for types of extent sentences that the literature has not focussed upon.