Extensions of co-event conflation : a cognitive semantico-syntactic study of space and motion in standard English and standard Arabic

Abstract EN

The Motion event and space are two central phenomena in cognitive linguistics because they are primary in human experience and cognition.

However, it is a well-established fact that languages differ in their linguistic expression of Motion..

The Motion event is subject to human spatial thinking and to crosslinguistic variations.

In addition, the construction of a basic Motion event has a mental schema in the human mind, i.e.

it provides a cognitive framework to the meaning of abstract domains, and it is lexicalised in all the world's languages.

Space is a complex linguistic domain based on the interaction between language and cognition.

In the traditional approaches to linguistics, space is treated as the physical location of an entity; however, in cognitive linguistics, space is considered as a mental representation ; that is, in addition to being physical, space always presents round and inside humans.

The present study adopts Talmy’s (2000) Lexicalisation Patterns theory to examine the extensions of Co-event conflation, where the Co-event in English and Arabic can extend to conflate with different Motion verbs to cover a wide range of phenomena.

The study arrives at a number of conclusions: the basic Motion event in English and Arabic consists of the Figure, the Path, the Ground, and the Motion, both languages can express the Motion event via using the Figure plus the verb only.

Unlike Arabic, English does have some Motion verbs that have two usages, where in its first usage the verb is more basic, while in its second usage the verb incorporates it former usage with the idea of Motion; the Enablement relation and the Concurrent Result, that are two phenomena of the Co-event conflation across various relations to the Motion event, are not lexicalised in Arabic, while they are exhibited in English.