Verbes de mouvement, espace et dynamiques de constitution

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Beyond the fact that defining a class of 'verbs of movement’ is difficult in practice, it appears that studying them gives rise to a diversity of approaches (formal ontology, cognitive psychology, semantic features, case roles). By re-examining oppositions such as verb-framed / satellite framed, objectivation / subjectivation, inaccusative / inergative, we will show that these attempts are dependent upon inadequate conceptions of movement and space. Numerous linguistic observations indeed indicate that movement (and space) should not be involved in semantics on the basis of a primary model essentially made of topologies and displacements, which would be constituted without any relation to other praxeological, qualitative, and intentional dimensions. It appears that all these intricate aspects — all the more so as they are co-constituted by language activity — cannot be simply dissociated into, for instance, path and manner, nor properly assessed just by adding a coding of case roles. By referring to a quite different model of perception and action, we show that the 'verbs of movement’ (as basic as monter, partir, sortir) work out their semantics by specifying, through a variety of grammatical constructions, the 'dynamics of the constitution’ of a phenomenological, practical and discursive field. Such an approach also sheds light on the genericity of verb meaning, allowing its transposition to the so-called functional or figurative meanings.

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