The Aqua-motion project (based in Moscow, Russia) is devoted to the description and cross-linguistic comparison of aqua-motion predicates, i.e. predicates denoting motion in a liquid medium – like swim, sail and float in English, nager, naviguer, flotter and surnager in French or płynąć and pływać in Polish.

Within the project's framework data have been collected on aqua-motion predicates in more than forty languages, either with the help of a special questionnaire or by examination of text corpora. This made it possible to compare aqua-motion systems in various parameters, and to suggest a number of generalizations concerning systems of aqua-motion predicates in different languages.

In particular, an important distinction has been made between the three semantic domains of aqua-motion, namely those of SWIMMING (“active motion”), SAILING (motion of vessels or aboard a vessel) and FLOATING (“passive motion”). Some languages manifest further distinctions, especially in the domain of FLOATING, where occasionally one can observe a contrast between drift and being on the surface.

The collective volume "Glagoly dvizhenija v vode: Leksicheskaja tipologija" [Verbs of aqua-motion: lexical typology, 752 pp.] was prepared during the project and published by the Indrik publishing house in early 2007. The book includes more than 30 papers, most of which present detailed portraits of individual aqua-motion systems in various languages of the world. A more detailed summary of the volume is available here.

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Timur Maisak & Ekaterina Rakhilina