Motion Events

Motion Events

1. Motion

   • "physical displacement"
   • "evolvement through time and space"

2. Why focus on motion?

   • All people think and talk about motion
   • Motion is highly complex because of the range of language-specific behaviours associated with it
   • The L2 learner may be confronted with a task of learning new ways to think and talk about motion
   • The centrality of motion and the linguistic diversity in motion behaviour makes this a suitable topicc for SLA research
     • ecological validity
     • learnability challenge

3. Motion Event

   • a situation that involves displacement of an object in relation to a reference point
   • At different temporal intervals, the object in motion occupies different spatial locations
     • Motion events are universally central to human experience across culture
       • Languages show differences in how they select and structure information about motion
         • One of these differences is the encoding of manner in which motion is carried out and the path along which it takes

4. Differences in event descriptions

   • The syntactic frames within manner and path information that is encoded
   • The optionality of encoding manner
   • English
     • Manner of motion is encoded in the main verb
     • Path of motion is encoded in the adverbial
   • Spanish
     • Path of motion is encoded in the main verb
     • Manner of motion is encoded in a gerund or is left unspecified