Fictive Motion in Persian: A Cognitive Approach to Coextension Paths

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Associate Professor, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies

2 M.A. in Linguistics, Alzahra University

Abstract

Human bodily experience of motion and observing the movement of other animate and inanimate creatures form a significant aspect of cognition. Image schemas as sensory-motor patterns of experience, which are pre-conceptual, non-propositional and prior to conceptualization are rooted in the experience of motion. Talmy's pioneering work (1975) on the lexicalization patterns of motion event in languages manifests the cognitive and conceptual significance of researches performed on motion and cognition. Talmy's research focuses on the denotational meaning of motion verbs, an aspect which is titled “factive motion”. However, he introduces the concept of “fictive motion” and its subcategories in another research (1996). The present paper is a detailed research on the category of coextension paths of fictive motion in Persian. Fictive motion is to assign motion to the things which cannot move in reality. Besides, the difference between fictive motion and metaphorical extension of motion is an (important) issue which is elaborated in this study.
  The present paper is a research on introducing fictive motion, as well as the representation of fictive motion in Persian on the basis of corpus data as a semantic typological motivation in languages. The main question of this research is: Does the Persian Language assign motion to non-moveable things? The answer to this question, with the aid of an array of data gathered from Spanish, English, Chinese and Polish paves the way for consideration of fictive motion as a semantic typological criterion in languages.

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Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Volume 2, Issue 6 - Serial Number 6
December 2014
Pages 1-25

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