The Latin term ‘motus’, meaning “a moving” or “motion,” is the progenitor of the Old French word ‘motif’, which survived unchanged into Modern French and was subsequently borrowed into English. ‘Motif’, in turn, inspired the English term ‘motive’ and its variants.
‘Motif’, employed in French to mean “theme” or “dominant feature,” was adopted into English to serve the same purpose, pertaining to a recurring idea in a literary work. The Germans borrowed it, too, attaching the native word ‘leit’ (meaning “lead,” synonymous with ‘primary’) to it to describe an element in a musical composition associated with and characteristic of a person, place, or thing. The ever-welcoming English language included ‘leitmotiv’ in its repertoire in the 1870s, a few decades after ‘motif’ was adopted.
However, ‘motive’, descended from the French term, dates from late medieval times and has spawned other words. ‘Motive’ refers to an inward inclination to behave in a certain way or to take a specific action or course; it is less commonly employed as an adjective. The connotation in a reference to someone’s motive for doing something is often a negative one; the word ‘often’ implies scheming for selfish purposes.
‘Automotive’ (‘motive’ joined with the Greek prefix meaning “self”) was coined to refer to a theoretical flying vehicle in the mid-19th century and later pertained to horseless carriages; ‘locomotive’ was started out as an adjective in the early 1600s but became associated with railroad technology 200 hundred years later, first in the phrase “locomotive engine” and soon thereafter as a noun itself.
‘Emotive’ began life as an adjective meaning “causing movement” and then acquired the connotation of “capable of emotion,” but its primary sense now, dating from early twentieth-century literary criticism, is “evoking emotions”. The verb ’emote’, meaning “to express emotions,” is a back-formation not from ’emotive’ but from the noun emotion.)
‘To motivate’ is to inspire or prompt action; the noun form is ‘motivation’.
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