Goal of motion in the Gospel of Luke: Towards amelioration of the prototypical contexts identification procedure

This paper aims to describe a sampling procedure for prototypical contexts dealing with the translational motion Goal in the Gospel of Luke. The survey is based on five versions of the Gospel of Luke in Koine Greek, English, Russian, Tabassaran and Sahidic Coptic. The main improvement proposed for the sampling technique is for the researcher to take into account not only accepted but also rejected contexts. The rejected contexts discovered are classified into unstable (metaphorical) and deficient contexts. The degree of the prototypicality of the 212 sampled contexts is measured in terms of the homogeneity of the coding. A context is treated as homogeneously coded where in all of the Gospel of Luke verses the meaning of the Goal is expressed by a closed set of basic grammatical markers. These basic markers are chosen based on a priori knowledge of the respective grammatical systems, and they tend to have the marking of the Goal as their main function. The portion of the sample with the most homogeneous coding is defined as the core of the sample. All the 212 contexts identified are additionally classified into several semantic groups. The taxonomic type of the Goal can distinguish between people, groups, body parts, settlements, buildings, biomes, artifacts, animals, means of transportation, substances, parts of buildings, natural objects, containers and abstract Goals. The topological types of the Goal are: space, surface, container and substance. The types of motion situations include: motion, placement, transition, non-volitional change of posture and transportation. Finally, in terms of the localization of the Trajector, the identified contexts can be labeled as APUD, CONT, IN, INTER, POST, SUB, SUPER. As expected, the semantic types are not equally distributed between the core contexts and the periphery. The best represented situation types of contexts in the core are those of motion and transition. The topology of the Goal is typically either space or container. The most frequent Goals in the core of the sample are settlement, person and building. The Trajector is generally localized IN and APUD ‘by’ with respect to the Landmark.