Abstract
This chapter deals with the sensory perception of vision and investigates the correlation between body, mind, and language in a corpus of English written descriptions of pictorial material. Expressions such as The track plunges down the mountain or The biceps muscle goes from the shoulder to the elbow represent a specific type of event verbalisation, which Talmy (1983) named ‘Fictive Motion’, whereby a degree of discrepancy exists between the visual experience of a stationary scene (track, muscle) and its linguistic description as a motion event (to plunge, to go). The production of such sentences requires the percipient/describer to mentally simulate motion along a path or linear configuration, although the subject noun phrase is a stationary entity. The frameworks of Cognitive Semantics (Talmy 2000) and Embodiment (Gallese and Lakoff 2005; Boulenger et al. 2008) along with the cognitively-oriented version of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006; Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón 2008) are the main theoretical approaches brought together (1) to address the category of General Fictivity and the Embodied Cognition Theory, (2) to analyse the syntactic patterns of Fictive Motion expressions, (3) to show the inconsistency of Matlock’s (2004) “binary typology”, and (4) to pin down the internal and external constraints that licence the wording of nonveridical motion events.
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Notes
- 1.
Examples such as Service stations are every now and then along the motorway show that fictive motion can be instantiated even in absence of a motion verb; it is the interpreter that builds a dynamic construal.
- 2.
- 3.
The array of patterns show that the coding of motion is, as any other dimension of grammar, subject to competing motivations (i.e. semantico-pragmatic, discourse-functional). Examples (5) and (8) represent an iconic dimension (iconicity of distance) as well as information structure (Communicative Dynamism and the End Weight/End Focus principles) (see MacWhinney et al. 2014).
- 4.
He calls factive the assessment of greater veridicality, while he calls fictive the assessment of greater nonveridicality. It is worth underlying that fictive is not to be equalled with fictitious, since it is not Talmy’s intention to suggest ‘objective unreality’ of the representation.
- 5.
These are as follows: Clarity, strength, ostension, objectivity, localizability, identifiability, content/structure, type of geometry, accessibility to consciousness, certainty, actionability, and stimulus dependence.
- 6.
Construal refers to the ability to perceive and describe the same situation in alternate ways by means of language choice: “Every lexical and grammatical element incorporates a particular way of construing conceptual content. It follows that a change in grammatical class involves a reconceptualization, and alternate construal resulting in a subtly different meaning in accordance with the abstract semantic values of the classes” (Langacker 2001: 8).
- 7.
Evidentiality may occur, as in ‘The river appears to run through a tunnel in the mountain’; it expresses the describer’s degree of certainty about what s/he sees, perhaps because s/he is distant from what s/he sees (Chafe and Nichols 1986).
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Baicchi, A. (2018). Ception and the Discrepancy Between Vision and Language. In: Baicchi, A., Digonnet, R., Sandford, J. (eds) Sensory Perceptions in Language, Embodiment and Epistemology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91277-6_6
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