Context
Introduced by cognitive linguist Leonard Talmy in 1981, force dynamics started out as a generalization of the traditional notion of the causative, dividing causation into finer primitives and considering the notions of letting, hindering, and helping. Talmy further developed the field in his 1985, 1988 and 2000 works.
Talmy places force dynamics within the broader context of cognitive semantics. In his view, a general idea underlying this discipline is the existence of a fundamental distinction in language between closed-class (grammatical) and open-class (lexical) categories. This distinction is motivated by the fact that language uses certain categories of notions to structure and organize meaning, while other categories are excluded from this function. For example, Talmy remarks that many languages mark the number of nouns in a systematic way, but that nouns are not marked in the same way for color. Force Dynamics is considered to be one of the closed-class notional categories, together with such generally recognized categories as number, aspect, mood, and evidentiality.
Aspects of force dynamics have been incorporated into the theoretical frameworks of Mark Johnson (1987), Steven Pinker (1997) and Ray Jackendoff (1990) (see Deane 1996 for a critical review of Jackendoff’s version of Force Dynamics). Force dynamics plays an important role in several recent accounts of modal verbs in various languages (including Brandt 1992, Achard 1996, Boye 2001, and Vandenberghe 2002). Other applications of force dynamics include use in discourse analysis (Talmy 1988, 2000), lexical semantics (Deane 1992, Da Silva 2003) and morphosyntactical analysis (Chun & Zubin 1990, Langacker 1999:352-4).
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