Volition (linguistics)

In linguistics, volition is a concept that distinguishes whether the subject, or agent of a particular sentence intended an action or not. Simply, it is the intentional or unintentional nature of an action. Volition concerns the idea of control and for the purposes outside of psychology and cognitive science, is considered the same as intention in linguistics. Volition can then be expressed in a given language using a variety of possible methods. These sentence forms usually indicate that a given action has been done intentionally, or willingly. There are various ways of marking volition cross-linguistically. When using verbs of volition in English, like want or prefer, these verbs are not expressly marked. Other languages handle this with affixes, while others have complex structural consequences of volitional or non-volitional encoding.

The way a particular language expresses volition, or control, in a sentence is not universal. Neither is any given linguist's approach to volition. Linguists may take a primarily semantic or primarily syntactic approach to understanding volition. Still others use a combination of semantics and syntax to approach the problem of volition.

A semantic approach to a given problem is motivated by the notion that an utterance is composed of many semantic units (compositionality). Each of these units plays a role in the overall meaning of an utterance. The effect of this is such that when a semantic unit is changed or removed, the meaning of the utterance will differ in some way.

A semantic approach to volition disregards any structural consequences (this is handled by the syntactic approach) and focuses primarily on speaker-meaning, and what the listener understands. For example, when a language uses affixation to encode volition (the addition of a semantic unit), such as in Sesotho (see section 2.3), it is possible to analyze the volitional component while overlooking the structural changes. Such an analysis would simply test the meaning difference with or without the volitional (verbal) affix (the semantic unit in question), as understood by the listener.

The hallmark of a syntactic approach to any problem is that it acknowledges various levels of structure. A syntactic approach to analyzing volition focuses primarily on structural change, and does not rely on either speaker meaning or the information understood by the listener in order to explain the phenomena.

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