The ways in which different languages encode motion events has been the topic of intense analysis and dissection in recent years, especially with regard to Talmy's (1991Talmy's ( , 2000 verb/satellite-framed typology. This chapter shifts course by moving away from motion event typologies and the encoding of canonical motion events. Instead, it shows that English speakers can conceptualise space in terms of motion events, even when they set out to encode locative events: This represents a second order function of motion-event conceptualisation. Such instances of motion-framed location, as lexicalised by the spatiotemporal prepositions 'before', 'after' and 'following', show that speakers can consider locative relationships in ways which differ markedly to the static perceptions of space behind the use of prototypical locative prepositions. This suggests that the salience of motion in everyday spatial perception colours the way in which locative relationships are encoded in English.2
When speakers encode a locative relationship in speech, they express the location of an object or a group of objects (the ‘Figure’) in relation to one or more reference objects (the ‘Ground’). However, they can also use gesture to express the lexical Ground’s location at the same time: this has been called a ‘gestural Figure’ (Tutton, 2013). Our aim in this paper is to examine why speakers use gestural Figures, and what these gestures reveal about spatial conceptualisation. To do this, we provide an in-depth analysis of a recurrent context in which gestural Figures occur: when speakers encode location with English between and French entre. These gestures reveal the salient horizontal axis underpinning the use of between and entre in context. Our analysis subsequently shows that gestural Figures also occur with a variety of other items that encode locative relationships. We argue that this highlights the pivotal nature of the Ground’s location to the selection and use of lexical items that encode locative relationships, while also revealing the intrinsically Figure-like quality of the lexical Ground. On a cognitive level, this implies that the lexical Ground is actually conceptualised as a Figure, thus highlighting a crucial similarity between the concepts of Figure and Ground as applied to locative expressions.
As speakers, we are frequently called upon to specify the locations of objects and landmarks in our environment. However, despite the considerable body of work on spatial cognition and semantics (i.e. Levinson 1992, 1996, 2003; Tyler and Evans 2003; Herskovits 1986; Vandeloise 1986), there has been almost no research on the expression of location from a multimodal viewpoint: that is, how do speakers use gesture, as well as speech, to express object location? This paper reports on a filmed study of 10 English speakers and 10 French speakers who were asked to express the locations of 28 objects in two spatial scenes. On the basis of our results we argue that a functional, as opposed to a grammatical, approach to the segmentation and analysis of these sorts of expressions is crucial. Such an approach reflects the fact that different Figures (i.e. objects to be located) can exist simultaneously across speech and gesture. Using filmed examples from our data set, we propose a new definition of static locative expressions and outline a multimodal approach for their analysis in oral discourse.
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