Yana Aquilina has been visiting the English department this semester, and has attended several of our seminars, where we have discovered common interests, including the notion of "non-actual motion", mentioned in the abstract below. Welcome to this IRL seminar, where we will jointly think about the experiential motivations behind the linguistic asymmetries that Yana is documenting. As usual, we will go for a post-seminar in Valvet afterwards, so let me (Jordan) know if wish to join by March 31!

Languages express sensory perception using a wide variety of strategies, to name but a few:  dedicated sensory vocabulary (e.g. a sound), ideophones (e.g. tick-tock), case marking (e.g. mne holodno ‘lit. for me it is cold’ in Russian to say ‘I am cold’). One of such cross-linguistically attested strategies is the usage of verbs of motion and other elements with directional meaning (e.g. prepositions or adverbs). By way of illustration, in (1) the visual experience is conveyed through a verbal phrase throw a glance in the direction […], whereas in (2) through come into view, in expressions that Blomberg & Zlatev (2013) refer to as non-actual motion sentences.

1. He threw a glance in the direction of the house.
2. The house came into his view. 

Lakoff (1993) and Talmy (1996) have observed that one and the same sensory experience can be expressed either as oriented from the EXPERIENCER (1) or towards them (2). What has been less explored are the motivations for either one (EXPERIENCER →) or the other (EXPERIENCER ←) directionality. I will discuss two possible axes of variation: (i) sensory modality (vision versus hearing); (ii) the degree to which perception is volitional. Based on a recent study of English (Aquilina submitted) and Russian (Aquilina 2024) contemporary fiction, as well as an ongoing typological exploration, I will show that visual and volitional experiences favour EXPERIENCER → directionality, whereas auditory and non-volitional experiences privilege EXPERIENCER ← (however, with exceptions in both cases). With your help, I would be very interested to put these findings in wider semiotic and phenomenological contexts. 

Aquilina, Y. (submitted). On SENSORY PATH and other asymmetries in the encoding of vision and hearing: the case of English.

Aquilina, Y. (2024). On the directional encoding and conceptualization of perceptual events: The case of English and Russian. 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. August 2024, Helsinki, Finland.

Blomberg, J. & Zlatev, J. (2013). Actual and non-actual motion: Why experimental semantics needs phenomenology (and vice versa). Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, 10.1007/s11097-013-9299-x. 

Lakoff, G. (1993). The metaphor system and its role in grammar. CLS 29, Vol. 2: Papers from the Parasession on the Correspondence of Conceptual, Semantic and Grammatical Representations.

Talmy, L. (1996). Fictive Motion in Language and “Ception.” In Language and Space (pp. 211–276). The MIT Press