Diving into English motion verbs from a lexico-semantic approach

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of English motion verbs in the specialized field of adventure tourism and proposes a terminological description of these verbs from a lexico-semantic approach. Motion verbs play a significant role in adventure tourism as they express central actions that are carried out in this domain and connect participants, such as tourists, places and typical instruments to these actions. The analysis aims to reveal how the linguistic properties of these verbs and their interactions with participants contribute to the expression of knowledge. After stating our assumptions and reviewing previous work, the article describes a corpus-based methodology to identify relevant verbs and the different steps taken to implement their description in the DicoAdventure database. The methodology comprises three main steps and is illustrated by applying it to a set of motion verbs extracted from the Advencor corpus.