Acting without acting: Sicilian "Mòviti fermo!" `Move still!' between human judgment andlanguage models

Natural languages do not only describe actions and states, but also provide resources to manage actions that are anticipated, discouraged, or redirected in interaction. This talk investigates a striking case from Sicilian, in which the verb MOVE can be used in apparently paradoxical directives such as "Mòviti fermo!" (lit. ‘Move still!’), instructing the addressee not to move. Rather than analysing it as a case of semantic reversal or contronymy, we argue that this usage reflects a general mechanism by which a dynamic verb is used to constrain and reorient an expected course of action. On this view, the apparent static meaning of MOVE arises only in contexts in which an alternative free movement is pragmatically available and must be neutralised. We explore this hypothesis through a parallel evaluation involving acceptability judgments from native speakers of Sicilian and distributional representations from a BERT-based language model. The results suggest that Sicilian MOVE does not encode stasis per se but an operation of action control. We discuss the implications of this view for the semantics–pragmatics interface and the limits of current language models in capturing such interactional meanings.