locativemotion

Locativemotion is a theoretical framework in linguistics and cognitive science that studies how locative information—indicating position, direction, or destination—interacts with the expression of motion in language and its processing by the mind. The term fuses locative grammar, which concerns spatial relations, with motion semantics, which describe movement events.

Core concepts include the decomposition of motion events into components such as source, path, destination (goal), and manner. Locativemotion emphasizes the locus of change—the locative frame in which the movement occurs—and how languages encode this frame through verb morphology, particles, case marking, or word order. The framework examines how destination versus source versus path is linguistically highlighted, and how this salience affects interpretation and memory.

Typological patterns vary: some languages encode locative information directly on the verb (directional verbs or affixes), others use spatial particles or case marking on nouns, and still others rely on multi-word constructions. Locativemotion thus coordinates lexicon (motion verbs), syntax (clause structure), and spatial semantics (locations, trajectories).

Methods include cross-linguistic survey, elicitation experiments, corpus-based studies, and psycholinguistic experiments. Locativemotion also intersects with related topics such as manner-of-motion, path verbs, and spatial cognition, and it has implications for natural language understanding, machine translation, and robotics where planning and reasoning about positions and trajectories are important.

See also: motion verb, spatial language, path semantics, locative expressions, spatial cognition.