Agir sur le corps pour se mouvoir dans l’espace

Abstract

This paper deals with causative verbs of motion extracted from a corpus of instructions in contemporary dance. The content of the corpus, the annotation procedure and the main models or patterns uncovered in the collected utterances are first set out. One of the models integrates causative verbs of motion that this analysis focuses on. In a second step, in order to classify these lexical items, the paper provides a broader discussion of the relationship between the expression of autonomous motion and that of caused motion and, in particular, of the way the semantic criteria singled out for analysing autonomous motion can be reused to study the expression of caused motion. After contextualizing the selected criteria within the corpus of dance instructions, the classification of the causative motion verbs is finally presented and commented.