Linguistics in Motion: Structuring Human Motion Behavior 2005-01-2695

Motion is not only essential for interacting with the environment but also for its understanding. It has many facets which go beyond simply reaching a goal. Motion information often serves as the basis for inferring interrelationships between events, states and intentions of an acting entity. Observers can often identify persons from afar from their movement alone with only a low resolution view. In this connection it is important to identify dominant factors influencing this sensation. It would also be important to analyze how this understanding of motion relates to our primarily technological, cybernetic understanding of the structure of motion. This paper addresses some issues in this field. By emphasizing the compositional aspect of motion it extends the common technological structuring approach into another dimension. It does not offer a solution but serves as a basis for further discussions. At a first step, a linguistic approach is used for structuring complex motion. In this case, single movements serve as lexical elements and form a general motion vocabulary. Syntactic rules defines links and relationships between different single motions, pragmatic rules between acting entities and motions, and semantic rules between motion and overall goal. By specifying the connection and links between single motions of a complex motion sequence, this compositional approach may make a description more natural and inclusive. This would foster the development of understanding and modeling complex motions for various applications.