Fictive motion

Fictive motion, also known as abstract, mental, virtual or subjective motion, is a special kind of mental scanning. It is the construal of a static scene in terms of motion. In physical motion, the moving object continually changes its location in time; in fictive motion, our eyes mentally scan an imaginary path, as in the following examples:

a. The gate leads into the garden.

b.The cliff drops down 600 feet.

Like physical motion, fictive motion involves directionality. In sentence (a) we mentally follow the path from the gate into the garden, and in sentence (b) our eyes roam from the top of the cliff down to the sea.

7) Windowing of attention / Focusing

We cannot possibly attend to all the stimuli around us; our brain subconsciously selects those stimuli for our attention that are salient or important to us. A well-known case is the so-called “party phenomenon”. At a party there may be several conversations going on around you at the same time; nevertheless you understand what the person you are talking to is saying or you might hear your name spoken by another person who you were not listening to.

Through linguistic expressions, we access particular portions of our conceptual universe. The dimension of construal referred to here as focusing includes the selection of conceptual content for linguistic presentation, as well as its arrangement into what can broadly be described (metaphorically) as foreground vs. background.

Focusing one’s attention is a cognitive operation which “windows” our attention on selected elements of a scene and downplays other elements. In our linguistic construal of a scene we also window our attention on selected elements. The very fact that something is explicitly mentioned in discourse means that the speaker directs at least some attention to it. We might even say that all of language is an inventory of attention-directing devices.

To a certain extent language preselects the possibilities for our windowing of attention.

For example, in sentence (1a), This train goes from Norwich to Peterborough, we window our attention on the whole route, including the starting-point and endpoint of the train journey. We may also window the final stretch of the journey to its endpoint, as in This train goes to Peterborough, or window the starting-point from the viewpoint of the goal, as in This train comes from Norwich. English does not, however, allow us to select the starting-point alone from another viewpoint, i.e. we cannot say * This train goes from Cambridge.

A single scene may often be described in different ways by windowing our attention on particular elements of it. A well-known example which nicely illustrates this point is a commercial transaction. The ‘commercial event’ frame comprises the following elements: a buyer, a seller, goods, money, and the exchange of the goods and money. When a speaker wants to describe a commercial transaction, she can bring any of these elements into focus by using different verbs: buy, sell, pay, spend, charge, and cost. Each of these verbs evokes the ‘commercial event’ frame, but does so in different ways. By choosing a given verb, attention is focused on some of the elements of the frame, while others are downplayed, i.e. they are not mentioned at all or their inclusion is optional. In the following examples, the optional participants are indicated by parentheses.

a. The cowboy bought a horse (from the sheriff) (for $500).

b. The sheriff sold (the cowboy) the horse (for $500).

c. The cowboy paid (the sheriff) $500 (for the horse).

d. The cowboy spent $500 (on the horse).

e. The sheriff charged (the cowboy) $500 (for the horse).

f. The horse cost (the cowboy) $500.

g. $500 buys (you) a good horse.

The main attention in each case is directed towards the entity expressed by the subject, and only secondarily towards the object entity. Here we can observe how the semantics of a verb interacts with the grammatical structure of a sentence. The following pair of sentences shows that the event is viewed from the perspective of the person who is expressed as the subject of the sentence:

a. The cowboy bought the horse for a good price.

b. The sheriff sold the horse for a good price.

What a good price means depends on the subject participant. For the buyer in (a) it means paying very little money, whereas for the seller in (b) it means getting a lot of money. Thus, if we want to draw attention to the buyer and secondarily to the goods, we use buy as in (a) and (a), if we want to draw attention to the seller and secondarily to the goods, we use sell as in (b) and (b).

Still, there are constraints on the combinations of elements that can be windowed in a sentence. For example, the verbs spend and cost do not allow us to open a window for the seller — although a seller is of course conceptually present in a commercial event. Thus, we cannot say *The cowboy spent $500 to the sheriff and *The horse cost $500 from the sheriff.

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