Syntactic alternations with verbs of motion: A corpus- drivenanalysis of the language of adventure tourism

Abstract

This paper analyses the syntactic and semantic characterisation of motion verbs, paying particular attention to the structural and relational link between this type of verbs and their participants in terms of argument structure realisation, as well as the syntactic alternations displayed by these verbs in the specialised domain of adventure tourism. Particularly, two subclasses of verbs of motion are examined: the subclass of run verbs (like ‘hike’) and the subclass of verbs that are vehicle names (like ‘canoe’), as some of the members of these groups were attested in previous studies as the most productive predicates in this specialised discourse (cf. Durán-Muñoz and L’Homme, 2020). This paper follows a corpus-driven methodology combined with a syntax-se-mantic approach. The corpus consulted is the ADVENCOR corpus, a specialised corpus focused on the field of adventure tourism. After a process of manual discarding, the sample of instances of grammatical constructions incorporating the selected verbs under study consisted in 578 contex-tualised instances. The sample was classified into different groups, depending on the subtype of verb of motion incorporated and the type of syntactic alternation displayed in each case. The main findings show that, although the intransitive basic or unmarked forms are frequent in the corpus examined, some verbs tend to occur more productively with other syntactically derived alterna-tions. This shows that the verbs under study follow a more restricted behaviour when used in the language of adventure tourism than their counterparts in general domains.