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<Paper uid="E95-1040">
  <Title>The Semantics of Motion</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Most of natural languages provide two types of lexical items to describe the motion of an entity with respect to some location: motion verbs (to run; to enter) and spatial prepositions (from; towards). Motion verbs can be used directly with a location, when they are transitive (to cross the town) or with a spatial preposition, when they are intransitive (to go through the town). The latter case is more interesting: most of the French motion verbs are intransitive and the interaction between motion verbs and spatial prepositions gives detailed informations about the way human beeings mentally represent spatiotemporal aspects of a motion. When we describe a motion, the fact to choose a verb instead of another, a preposition instead of another, a syntactic structure instead of another, reveals our mental cognitive representation. We claim that natural languages can be considered as a trace of these representations, in which it is possible, with systematic and detailled linguistic studies, to light up the way spatiotemporal properties are represented and on which basic concepts these representations lie. We present such linguistic investigations on French motion verbs and spatial prepositions and the basic concepts we have found. We also address compositional semantics for motion complexes (ie. a motion verb followed by a spatial preposition) and show that the complexity and the refinements of the linguistic studies presented just before are justified and required at the compositional level in order to capture the different behaviours in the compositional processes that exist with the French language. We also compare with the English language and draw some conclusions on the benefits of our approach.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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