Among the appearances of fictive motion, there are the cases which don`t have motion verbs though they present motion. And fictive motion with motion verbs can be divided into two categories, one for tangible objects and the other for intangible objects. As a result, fictive motion can be classified into three categories, fictive motion without motion verbs, fictive motion with motion verbs for tangible objects and fictive motion with motion verbs for intangible objects. The purpose of this study is to search for the cognitive mechanisms of these three different categories, After investigating them, this study will show the differences and common features of the different categories of fictive motion.

Over the past few decades, a lot of research has been conducted on what factors influence the choice of Figure and Ground in the description of a situation, e.g., Talmy (1983, 2000) and Langacker (1991) among others. However, the choice of Figure and Ground is very subtle in that both the objective properties of the entities and the subjective perspective or attention of the speaker interact with each other. Specifically, little has been said to provide a unified understanding of different syntactic and semantic structures which deal with the same situation, involving Figure and Ground relation. For this reason, this paper aims to elaborate the possible elements which govern the choice of Figure and Ground in a given sentence and account for various syntactic and semantic structures in terms of Figure and Ground organization. These include Figure-Ground reversal by means of (a-)symmetric relation, active and passive voice, lexicalization patterns, crosslinguistic difference between English and Korean, semantic roles, selectional restrictions, and discourse.