Fictive Motion

Fictive motion is a relatively new subject in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Fictive motion is motion that is not actually happening in the physical world; it is an imagined type of motion whereby we construct a visual image of a specific scene being described. An example of a fictive motion sentence is “The path runs along the cliff,” where the “path” is the subject and “runs” is the motion verb. Most importantly, the road is not physically running along the cliff but there is a fleeting sense of motion. In contrast, a non-Fictive Motion sentence, such as the “The path lies along the coast,” does not have a motion verb and does not evoke a sense of motion. Talmy notes in several works that there is a vast amount of evidence from various languages to prove the existence of fictive motion as dynamic mental representations. He notes, however, that fictive motion sentences need not involve vivid imagery whereby the listener imagines him- or herself moving through the scene depicted (Talmy, 1996).

Motion Verbs appear in all languages and are highly polysemous. They have many different uses in many different contexts (Miller, 1972). Literally, motion verbs describe a change in position over two points on a plane. But there is also a figurative interpretation of these verbs. According to Boroditsky (2000) motion stimuli can metaphorically map itself onto conceptual domains, including a change in time, or a transformation of spatial information. Cognitive linguists once believed that fictive motion implied a state change or that it was somehow a special case of figurative language. However, fictive motion is now seen as being somewhat analogous to real motion in terms of processing; for instance, it takes time to “travel” from one scene to another (Matlock, 2004, 2006).

History

Cognitive linguist Leonard Talmy coined the term "fictive motion" in 1996. It first appeared in a book chapter called “Fictive motion in language and ‘ception’” (Talmy, 1996), and was discussed in depth in Talmy’s book, "Toward a Cognitive Semantics Vol. 1", in 2000. The idea was originally called “virtual motion” by Talmy in the early 1980s (e.g., Talmy,1983).

Experimental evidence

In a recent study conducted at Stanford University by Teenie Matlock, currently at UC Merced, and Daniel Richardson, currently at UC Santa Cruz; conducted further research on fictive motion. Interested in the influence of fictive motion language on eye movements, they studied where and how people looked while they were presented with pictures of spatial scenes and descriptions of the pictures. According to Richardson and Spivey (2004), eye movements differ between cognitive and perceptual activities, and that scene perception in “bottom up” processing leads to more eye movements, as opposed to “top down” processing using previous knowledge, changes the way a scene is examined (Henderson, 2003). Michael Spivey has also shown that stories can influence movement on an axis even when the listener is looking at a blank page (2001). To further test their theories, Matlock and Richardson conducted an experiment where subjects were instructed to view an image of a static scene while listening to either a fictive motion sentence, or a non-fictive motion sentence. The main question investigated in this study was, “Would participants spend more time inspecting figures with fictive motion sentences than figures with non-fictive motion sentences?” The results indicated that indeed people did spend more time gazing at figure with fiction motion language (Matlock & Richardson, 2004). In a later study on Stanford undergraduates, they found that the longer eye gaze patterns with fictive motion was not simply due to there being something more interesting about fictive motion in general (Richardson & Matlock, in press).

References

*Boroditsky, (2000)
*Henderson, (2003)
*Matlock, T. (2006). Depicting fictive motion in drawings. In J. Luchenbroers, (Ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Investigations across languages, fields, and philosophical boundaries. Amsterdam: John H. Benjamins.
*Matlock, T., & Richardson, D.C. (2004). Do eye movements go with fictive motion? Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
*Miller, (1972)
*Spivey, Michael (2001)
*Talmy, Leonard (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics Vol. 1. MA: MIT Press.
*Talmy, Leonard (1996).
*Talmy, Leonard (1983).