Depicting Fictive Motion in Drawings

Motion verbs are pervasive. Found in all languages and all levels of discourse (Miller 1972; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976), they are highly polysemous, affording a range of interpretations and occurring in a wide variety of grammatical constructions. When interpreted literally, motion verbs express movement along a trajectory, as in Bob goes down the walkway and The stray cat runs across the alley. In such cases, the subject noun phrase referent (e.g., Bob) is animate and capable of traveling through space. When interpreted figuratively, motion verbs often express no physical perceivable movement, as in Weekends go by fast and The tone went from morose to ecstatic. In these cases, motion information metaphorically maps on to relatively abstract conceptual domains, such as change and time, and spatial information is transformed or backgrounded (see Boroditsky, 2000; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Radden, 1997, for discussion of CHANGE IS MOTION, TIME IS SPACE, and related conceptual metaphors). Another pervasive figurative motion verb use is shown in (1a) and (1b). It too describes a static scene, but in this case, spatial information is highlighted, especially spatial information relating to the trajector (here, subject noun phrase).