CC BY
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Section 6. Linguistics
Section 6. Linguistics
Gontarenko Nataliya Nikolaevna, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, English Philology Department, teaching assistant E-mail: natgontarenko@yahoo.com
Fictive motion verbs in English: a cognitive linguistics perspective
Abstract: The article explores the relationship between thought about motion and language about motion, in particular, figurative language about motion expressed by neological verbs. The author adopts a cognitive linguistics perspective on verb semantics, which allows for a more profound understanding of the complex hierarchy of linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge associated with a lexical unit.
Keywords: fictive motion, figurative language, motion verb, simulation, cognitive linguistics.
Motion verbs have been widely studied and analyzed in the field of linguistics, and have been categorized by semantic as well as syntactic approaches. Researchers such as L. Talmy and T. Matlock [7; 3] have demonstrated the need to consider the cognitive constructs which speakers bring to situations and which form the basis for new inventive language.
Recently new verbs have arisen from a definable Internet-connected culture. They could not have arisen from a non-tech culture, nor do they know ethnic, racial, geo-political boundaries. The Y (or Millennial) Generation have only known increasingly fast technology in their lifetime; they value speed, massive data storage, instantaneous information retrieval and information sharing. The coined word “to google drift" has come into the vernacular as have “to skype”, “to facebook creep”, “to yahoo", “to text message”, and “to IM” (instant message). These neologisms deserve attention from a cognitive linguistics perspective. In this paper, a linguistic analysis of the structural formation of motion verbs is coupled with a cognitive description of structure and domains, followed by an anthropological description that offers context for new word genesis and analysis of other new motion verbs.
Motion verbs abound in English and have been well-researched from syntactic, semantic and cognitive approaches. B. Levin [2] distinguishes Verbs of Inherently Directed Motion (to ascend, to tumble), Manner of Motion Verbs (to roll, to creep), Verbs of Motion Using a Vehicle (to bus, to jeep), Waltz verbs (to foxtrot, to rumba, to waltz), Chase Verbs (to track, to follow), and Accompany Verbs (to escort, to guide). One category of motion verbs B. Levin presents involves that of movement by vehicles. This category easily can add new
motion verbs by means of zero derivation from nouns (bus, motor, ski):
(1) They bussed the children to another school.
The neological verbs to google drift, to yahoo, to face-book creep, to skype can belong to this class because they were derived from the names of search engines or software with the help of which information moves or a user moves in virtual space while searching for information:
(2) I was looking for information on the Holocaust and I found a lot of neat sites with historical facts about Germany. — Oh, you were google drifting.
(3) My friend always Facebook creeps when she gets bored at work.
It is this category of fictive motion verbs that is the focus of this study. Both google drift and facebook creep denote instantaneous electronic motion in virtual space. Literal contexts take on virtual meanings and the human mind plays with literal meaning in physical contexts and extends ideas into virtual space. In (1) to bus denotes displacement; however, there is no displacement involved in (2) and (3). Nevertheless, while no physical movement takes place, Internet users who google retrieve information and “travel” in virtual space to a new Skype “location”. L. Talmy [7] refers to motion involving no physical occurrence as fictive motion.
(4) The mountain range goes from Canada to Mexico [7, 104].
L. Talmy claims that fictive motion in (4) is evoked by two discrepant representations of the same object — the mountain range. The fictive representation consists of the literal reference of the words that depict the mountain range as moving. The factive representation consists of our belief that the mountain range is stationary.
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Fictive motion verbs in English: a cognitive linguistics perspective
(5) The sun is shining into the cave/onto the back wall of the cave [7, 112].
In (5) the effect of fictive motion is governed by “the active-determinative principle, namely the more active or determinative entity is the Source from which fictive motion emanates through space until reaching the less active or determinative entity, the distal object" [7, 120]. The sun is perceived as the brighter of the two objects in (5), and through this greater brightness the sun is interpreted as the more active object and will be conceptualized as the source of fictive motion.
The verbs to google drift and to facebook creep are similar to the ones denoting fictive motion because they do not involve physical displacement and because there are two discrepant representations of the agent who is googling or skyping, i. e. the agent’s physical location is stable, but there is motion going on in their mind under the influence of what they see on the computer screen.
Language ability is a productive and creative process. New word formation, as we have seen, is often based on structures and constructs with which we are familiar and we supplant them with new experiences which also need to be expressed.
We experience a sense ofself-movement when looking out of the window of a motionless train at a train leaving the station. This experience is similar to the one we have when browsing websites. The fact that the illusion of selfmotion is sometimes very compelling is demonstrated in a study by B. Riecke et al [4]. In their experiment, observers were asked to rate convincingness of self-motion experience induced by visual stimuli presented on a screen. The experiment revealed that a visual stimulus depicting a natural scene (e. g. a market place) can produce stronger perception of self-motion illusion than scrambled versions of the same stimulus. Natural surroundings are normally self-stationary, so when we see motion between ourselves and large, distant parts of our surroundings, we are more inclined to attribute the relative movement to ourselves instead of the surroundings. It is argued that “such scenes can serve as “frames of reference” with respect to which perceived relative motion is more likely to be attributed to self-motion than object motion” [4, 196]. Thus, when we say we “google drift” or “facebook creep”, we perceive ourselves to be moving through the internet, when, in fact, vast gigabytes of electronic signals have been quickly encoded, sent, retrieved, and returned.
Research on mental simulation [3] suggests that when asked to think about familiar physical space and movement in it, subjects imagine in their heads a physical space and construct mental models analogous to physical
movement. In the experiment, participants read stories about travel and then made timed decisions about a fic-tive motion sentence being related to the story or not. The stories described slow or fast travel, short or long distances, easy or difficult terrain. It took people longer to decide whether a fictive motion sentence was related to the story if the story described long-distance travel, difficult terrains, and slow motion. T. Matlock says, “One explanation for these differences is that while people were reading the story, they constructed a model, including a path and motion along that path. Next, while attempting to understand and make a decision about the fictive motion sentence, they simulated motion along the path in a way that was consistent with the way the protagonist had moved. For instance, when people imagined a person driving on a road along a smooth, flat shoreline, they simulated motion more quickly than when they had imagined driving on a road along a rugged shoreline” [3, 1394]. It can be hypothesized that the people who google drift or facebook creep mentally simulate motion, which is a kind of fictive motion.
Human interactions with computers have created a new kind of reality — virtual reality. According to D. Stanovsky, “virtual reality is currently used to describe an increasingly wide array of computer generated or mediated environments, experiences and activities ranging from the near ubiquity of video games, to emerging technologies such as tele-immersion” [5, 167]. D. Stanovsky makes an interesting assumption that new experiences have to be fit within old schemas which can mean that human perception of virtual space is a reflection ofreal space. This is an instance of how we categorize new words. First we try to find similarities between existing words and new words and fit these new words into existing categories.
(6) You should go to his website. He has a lot of information there.
While referring to computer-mediated experiences, we use the words that describe the real world — we go to a website just like we go to a store or a library, and the stem “site” in “website” indicates that we subconsciously perceive cyberspace as a place. H. Fischer defines cyberspace is follows: “Cyberspace is like a stretched canvas, a space with no depth other than that of light, which points to somewhere else. We move laterally through it using the cursor, scrolling the page up or down, left or right, or we leap to other surfaces as flat as screens” [1, 47].
Due to e-mail, video conferencing, etc. Internet users can move to any place in virtual space in a split second. It is a new kind of motion — electronic, instantaneous — and Internet users overwhelmingly associate it
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Section 6. Linguistics
with Google. Google is a huge company known all over the world as the best medium ofvirtual communication. It has become a symbol of worldwide Internet culture which values innovativeness, individual freedom, speed, and instantaneous access to information. Why virtual motion is associated with Google rather than Yahoo is a reflection of the fact that Google as a business has absorbed a vast majority of market share and the phrase ‘to google drift’ has become embedded in modern Internet culture. Whereas the Internet culture values speed and instantaneous information retrieval, it also acknowledges an inevitable, but directionless and less productive, use of Internet virtual movement.
To conclude, the late twentieth century witnessed the growing and dominance of a particular kind of motion — that of virtual motion in space referred to as cyberspace or virtual reality. Those who engage in super-rapid computer access expect and demand instantaneous, multi-megabyte access and retrieval of information, products, communication, and they form new words and phrases rapidly based on their psychological constructs of their physical and virtual reality. People construct models that resemble physical space and simulate objects and movement in these spatial models. Simulation might also be involved in fictive motion processing.
References:
1. Fischer H. Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality/H. Fischer. - Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, - 2006. - 280 p.
2. Levin B. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation/B. Levin. - Chicago: University of Chicago Press, - 1993. - 348 p.
3. Matlock T. Fictive Motion as Cognitive Simulation/T. Matlock//Memory and Cognition. - 2004. - 32.8 (Dec). -p. 1389-1400.
4. Riecke B. Cognitive Factors Can Influence Self-Motion Perception (Vection) in Virtual Reality/B. Riecke, J. Schulte-Pelkum, M. Avraamides, Markus Von Der Heyde, & H. Bulthoff//ACM Transactions on Applied Perception. - 2006. - 3.3 (July). - p. 194-216.
5. Stanovsky D. Virtual Reality/D. Stanovsky//The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information. - Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. - 2004. - p. 167-177.
6. Strauss C. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning/C. Strauss, N. Quinn. - New York: Cambridge University Press, - 1997. - 336 p.
7. Talmy L. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Volume I: Concept Structuring Systems/L. Talmy. - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, - 2000. - 495 p.
Klimova Julia Alexandrovna, Belgorod State University, candidate of Philology, Associate Professor the Faculty of Russian Language and professional - verbal communication BSU E-mail: julia_klimova07@mail.ru
Strebkova Marina Viktorovna, Belgorod State University, senior Lecturer, the Faculty of Russian Language and professional - verbal communication BSU E-mail: yastrebok58@yandex.ru
Language categorization as a reflection of knowledge
Abstract: The article is devoted to the question of language categorization as a reflection of the process of cognition. The author notes that the most important structures of knowledge are objectified and stored in a linguistic form. Knowledge of linguistic units, which are also the part of this world, are stored in our memory in a category form. Accordingly, language is seen as a category formation.
Keywords: category, cognition, language categorization, linguistic form, grammatical system.
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