The Semantics of Motion

The Semantics of Motion Pierre Sablayrolles I R I T -- Universit~ Paul Sabatier 118 route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse - France phone : +33 61 55 67 64 fax : +33 61 55 83 25 e-mail : sablay@irit.fr Abstract In this paper we present a semantic study of motion complexes (ie. of a mo- tion verb followed by a spatial preposi- tion). We focus on the spatial and the temporal intrinsic semantic properties of the motion verbs, on the one hand, and of the spatial prepositions, on the other hand. Then we address the problem of combining these basic semantics in or- der to formally and automatically de- rive the spatiotemporal semantics of a motion complex from the spatiotempo- ral properties of its components. 1 Introduction Most of natural languages provide two types of lexical items to describe the motion of an entity with respect to some location: motion verbs (to run; to enter) and spatial prepositions (from; towards). Motion verbs can be used directly with a location, when they are transitive (to cross the town) or with a spatial preposition, when they are intransitive (to go through the town). The latter case is more interesting: most of the French mo- tion verbs are intransitive and the interaction be- tween motion verbs and spatial prepositions gives detailed informations about the way human bee- ings mentally represent spatiotemporal aspects of a motion. When we describe a motion, the fact to choose a verb instead of another, a preposition instead of another, a syntactic structure instead of another, reveals our mental cognitive represen- tation. We claim that natural languages can be considered as a trace of these representations, in which it is possible, with systematic and detailled linguistic studies, to light up the way spatiotem- poral properties are represented and on which ba- sic concepts these representations lie. We present such linguistic investigations on French motion verbs and spatial prepositions and the basic con- cepts we have found. We also address composi- tional semantics for motion complexes (ie. a mo- tion verb followed by a spatial preposition) and show that the complexity and the refinements of the linguistic studies presented just before are jus- tified and required at the compositional level in order to capture the different behaviours in the compositional processes that exist with the French language. We also compare with the English lan- guage and draw some conclusions on the benefits of our approach. 2 Lexical Semantics for Motion Verbs Following Gruber (1965), Jackendoff (1976), Boons (1985), we approach motion verbs in terms of some "localist semantical" role labels. The lin- guistic study of French intransitive motion verbs (see eg. (Asher & Sablayrolles, 1994a)) we have realized has allowed the definition of an ontology for "location" in three basic concepts: • locations which are concrete places (a room; a house; a street); • positions which are parts of a location (the position where I am in this room); • postures which are ways to be in a position (to …

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