Towards a typology of fictive motion eventsreview of existing proposals and presentation of new perspectives

Abstract

: This paper focuses on a specific subtype of motion, known in the field as fictive motion. In our analysis, we have discovered that the MOTION metaphor, in combination with metonymy and image-schemas, underlies the semantic configuration of fictive motion events. Taking these ideas as a starting point, our analysis of the corpus has allowed us to revise the existing typologies of fictive motion events (Matlock 2004). We prove that the existing typologies are not accurate, since they do not account properly for the linguistic realization of fictive motion events. In our proposal, we depart from the previous assumptions and we propose a typology of fictive motion events based on the number of arguments that the verb may take. We also analyse the role that metonymy, in combination with metaphor and image-schemas, has in the semantic configuration of fictive motion events