The conceptualisation of the route: Non-directed and directed motion verbs in Bulgarian and English

This chapter offers an analysis of non-directed and directed motion verbs from a
frame semantics perspective through exploring the semantic description and
syntactic realisation of the frame elements of several semantic frames in FrameNet.
The study is focused on the conceptualisation and syntactic expression of the
elements of the route along which motion occurs: Goal (the final part of the route),
Source (the initial part of the route) and Path (the middle part of the route) in
English and Bulgarian by studying the syntactic expression of the corresponding
frame elements in FrameNet. The research questions explored in the chapter deal
with the prominent aspects in the semantics of the verbs evoking a particular
semantic frame, the syntactic expression of the relevant frame elements, syntactic
explicitness and implicitness. The empirical evidence provided by the FrameNet
corpus is compared with a sample of annotated Bulgarian examples. The
observations made throughout the chapter are brought in the perspective of linguistic
hypotheses put forward in the literature: in particular, the goal-over-source hypothesis
and the proposal that motion verbs tend to co-occur with expressions
that align with the part of the trajectory of motion that is most prominent in their
semantics.