Localisme et Sémantique Lexicale

For a few years, many authors dealing with semantics have emphazised on the notion of movement in their theories. Some of these researchers (like Jackendoff 1983 and 1990) think that the notions of movement and location in space are the basis of the meaning of all the verbs, while others, including J. Miller (1985), assert that movement is the cornerstone of semantics. In this paper, we present both points of view and compare them with our vision of movement in semantics. Our position is based on our doctoral research, which is a contribution to the study of the semantics of the Spanish verbs of Mexico City. After the study of the 312 verbs of our corpus (using a "modified" version of Coseriu's structural semantics), we observed that movement, even if it has central place in semantics, cannot be used alone to identify the meaning of verbs, nor can it be the basis of the meaning of all the vocabulary of a language.