The DinaVmouv base is a lexicon including more than a thousand motion verbs in French. It was created by D. Stosic and M. Aurnague in 2017 as part of their extensive research on the expression of space in language, conducted in the CLLE research laboratory, supported by CNRS and University Toulouse 2. The lexicon was extended in 2023 in collaboration with Chiara Minoccheri, Stosic's and Aurnague's PhD student. Building this resource has benefited from a long-standing tradition of research on French motion verbs carried out by some research laboratories in Paris and Toulouse since the early 1980s, with the goal of building and describing the lexicon of verbs expressing motion in a broad sense.

The lexicon is in the form of an interactive spreadsheet allowing you to filter and/or to sort the data, organized in ten columns. In addition to the list of verbs, the DinaVmouv base provides a minimal semantic description of each verb (type of motion conveyed, lexical aspect, manner), as well as its definitions extracted from two electronic dictionaries, namely the TLFi and/or the GLAWI, which is based on the French Wiktionary. The lexicon offers various possibilities of data visualization, such as displaying all entries, searching for a single verb, or filtering the data of a given column by choosing your criteria. For example, you can select verbs expressing the action of walking by searching the term marcher ‘walk’ in the header of the ranges with definitions. The results obtained can be browsed or downloaded in .csv format. While the DinaVmouv base is indisputable proof of the richness of the lexicon of verbs expressing motion in French, it is clearly anything but exhaustive. It will continue to grow and to be updated in the coming months and years: new entries - not included in this version - will thus be regularly added. You can also contribute to enriching it by submitting missing motion verbs via this form.

Dejan Stosic
Contact : dejan.stosic@univ-tlse2.fr

Some rights are reserved. DinaVmouv is distributed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 licence.

For any use of the DinaVmouv base, please cite the data source as follows: Stosic, D., Minoccheri, C. & Aurnague, M. 2023. DinaVmouv (V2): Description, INventaire, Analyse des Verbes de MOUVement. An annotated lexicon of motion verbs in French. Freely available at: http://redac.univ-tlse2.fr/lexicons/dinaVmouv.html. [ EndNote ]

The DinaVmouv logo is designed by Benoît Colas (UT2J/CPRS-DAR) © 2018 All rights reserved.

The DinaVmouv base is accompanied by documentation explaining the structure of the tabular data, the classification of motion verbs that has been adopted, as well as the terms used for describing the verbs collected. For more details about notions and terms used in the documentation, see the papers cited in the References section below.

DinaVmouv online browser
The user interface has been developed by Edyta Osuch (MSHS Toulouse, USR 3414) with the Tabulator plugin.

• Aurnague, M. 2008.. Qu'est-ce qu'un verbe de déplacement ? : critères spatiaux pour une classification des verbes de déplacement intransitifs du français. In J. Durand, B. Habert & B. Laks (Eds.), Actes du Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, CMLF'08 (1905-1917). Paris: ILF & EDP Sciences. DOI: 10.1051/cmlf08041.
• Aurnague, M. 2011. How motion verbs are spatial: The spatial foundations of intransitive motion verbs in French. Lingvisticae Investigationes, 34(1), 1-34.
• Aurnague, M. 2012. De l'espace à l'aspect : les bases ontologiques des procès de déplacement.. CORELA, HS-12. DOI: 10.4000/corela.2846
• Aurnague, M. 2019. About asymmetry of motion in French: Some properties and a principle. In M. Aurnague & D. Stosic (Eds), The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French: Descriptive, experimental and formal studies on motion expression (31-66). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Cappelli, F. 2013. Étude du mouvement fictif à travers un corpus d'exemples du français : perspective sémantique du lexique au discours. Thèse de doctorat, Toulouse: Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail.
• Minoccheri, C. 2023. L'espace dans le corps, le corps dans l'espace. L'expression linguistique du mouvement en danse contemporaine. Thèse de Doctorat, Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès.
• Moline, E., & Stosic, D. 2016. L'expression de la manière en français. Paris: Ophrys.
• Stosic, D. 2009. La notion de «manière» dans la sémantique de l'espace. Langages, 175, 103-121.
• Stosic, D. 2019. Manner as a cluster concept: What does lexical coding of manner of motion tell us about manner?. In M. Aurnague & D. Stosic (Eds), The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French: Descriptive, experimental and formal studies on motion expression (141-178). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.