To move (boat) quietly and
smoothly across water
To fly quietly
To move quietly and smoothly
in an effortless way
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The verb dart
describes sudden movement in air and on land:
(3) He darted
across the room.
(4) Bees were
darting from one flower to another.
The verbs dive, plunge and sink designate downward movement in air and water:
(5) She plunged
into the swimming-pool.
(6) The falcon
plunged towards its prey.
Sink, as the
general term, denotes movement in a wider variety of contexts:
(7) Helen sank into
water/mud/an armchair.
However, we
postulate that the verbs dart, dive and sink prototypically describe movement
in a given medium: dart is prototypically associated with air, and dive and
sink with water. Our claim is supported by the fact that the medium parameter
need not be syntactically present:
(8) She dived from
the bridge and rescued the drowning child.
(9) The
aircraft-carrier, hit by a torpedo, sank at once.
Further, as we will
show below, sink has a metaphorical projection onto FEELING, which codifies the
metaphor Emotion = Liquid (Goatly 1997):
(10) When he
crashed, his heart sank at the thought that he might die.
Finally, glide
refers to quiet/smooth movement in a wide range of contexts (water, air, land):
(11) The cruiser
glided across the sea.
(12) An owl glided
over the fields.
(13) The snake
glided towards its prey.
As mentioned above, the domain of MOVEMENT is marked by the semantic parameter of direction, which
can determine verb membership. The lexemes jump, vault, leap, hop and spring are
subsumed under various subdomains depending on whether they denote forward or
upward/downward movement over an obstacle: