English Verbs of Motion and Prototype Theory (original) (raw)

2013

Abstract

1. IntroductionThe main aim of the paper is to analyse the English verbs of motion from the perspective of Prototype Theory, using the findings of S. G. Pulman (1983), which will be presented in the next section. To this point, Prototype Theory has been mostly concerned with nouns, sometimes with adjectives and prepositions, but there have been very few attempts to apply Prototype Theory to verb analyses. After a short historical overview of the development of Prototype Theory and a presentation of two major attempts to approach verbs using Prototype Theory, the English verbs of motion, as defined and selected in Miller 1972 and Levin 1993, are sorted in accordance with two prototypicality experiments involving respondents and one frequency experiment based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The paper will also try to find out whether there are any semantic "patterns" in the order of verbs obtained from the three experiments.2. Theoretical framework2.1....

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