Phenomenology and Typology of Motion

The project investigates the human experience of different kinds of motion, and the ways different languages and individual speakers construe such experience. On a general level, the project will clarify the interrelation between experiential motivations and linguistic conventions. More specifically, it will clarify how semantic conventions are realized in the speech and gestures of children and adults, and explore the dimensions of cross-linguistic variation. By combining methods and concepts from phenomenology (i.e. the systematic description of what appears to consciousness), cognitive and typological linguistics (investigating universals and variation in the semantics of languages) and developmental psycholinguistics (studying the way children acquire the conventions of their languages) the project will break new ground in each of these areas, and in synergetic fields such as cognitive science and cognitive semiotics.