The Semantics of Motion

In this paper we present a semantic study of motion complexes (ie. of a motion verb followed by a spatial preposition). We focus on the spatial and the temporal intrinsic semantic properties of the motion verbs, on the one hand, and of the spatial prepositions, on the other hand. Then, we address the problem of combining these basic semantics in order to formally and automatically derive the spatiotemporal semantics of a motion complex from the spatiotemporal properties of its components.