Disambiguation of French motion/location expressions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2024/15/0034/000659Keywords:
motion events, boundary-crossing, disambiguation taskAbstract
The present study investigates reading preferences for French sentences containing a Manner of motion verb and a prepositional phrase which are ambiguous between a location and a locomotion reading. We tested how different prepositions and different Manner of motion verbs influence reading preferences. 61 native French speakers judged different ambiguous sentences by selecting one of two suggested contexts, each clearly suggesting one of the two readings. Results show that overall, locomotion readings are possible with all tested prepositions, but more likely with à travers ‘through’ than with ambiguous prepositions. Manner of motion verbs fall into two classes, one allowing the locomotion reading and the other one not. We provide experimental evidence confirming patterns observed in previous corpus studies.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
