Frame-relative constructions in the description of motion

Abstract

Fictive motion in language is the manifestation of our cognitive bias towards dynamism and a good example of the metaphoric nature of much of our thought and linguistic effort. This paper investigates one of its types, frame-relative constructions (“I sat in the car and watched the scenery rush by”) in a corpus of alpine narratives. We report on the types of constructions found and suggest the communicative motivations behind their use, followed by the examination of the variety of their linguistic encodings. Finally, we raise the question how the nuanced concepts represented by such constructions relate to those already embedded in an existing spatial language annotation scheme.