A Compositional Spatio-temporal Semantics for French Motion Verbs and Spatial PPs

This paper yields a semantics for the spatio-temporal 'properties of motion complexes in French. By motion complex we understand here a motion verb followed by a spatial prepositional phrase adjunct (PP) . Unlike other semantic or syntactic studies, we build up the spatio-temporal semantic properties of motion verb complexes compositionally, on the basis of the semantic properties of the verb, its arguments and adjuncts in the complex. We claim that the spatial and temporal semantics of a motion verb complex is a specifiable function of the spatial and temporal semantics of each component of the complex. Let us illustrate this by contrasting the complexes given in the following examples.