Ception and the discrepancy between vision and language

This chapter deals with the sensory perception of vision and investigates the correlation between body, mind, and language in a corpus of English written descriptions of pictorial material. Expressions such as The track plunges down the mountain or The biceps muscle goes from the shoulder to the elbow represent a specific type of event verbalisation, which Talmy (1983) named ‘Fictive Motion’, whereby a degree of discrepancy exists between the visual experience of a stationary scene (track, muscle) and its linguistic description as a motion event (to plunge, to go). The production of such sentences requires the percipient/describer to mentally simulate motion along a path or linear configuration, although the subject noun phrase is a stationary entity. The frameworks of Cognitive Semantics (Talmy 2000) and Embodiment (Gallese and Lakoff 2005; Boulenger et al. 2008) along with the cognitively-oriented version of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006; Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal Usón 2008) are the main theoretical approaches brought together (1) to address the category of General Fictivity and the Embodied Cognition Theory, (2) to analyse the syntactic patterns of FictiveMotion expressions, (3) to show the inconsistency of Matlock’s (2004) “binary typology”, and (4) to pin down the internal and external constraints that licence the wording of nonveridical motion events.