animacy and spatial terms

[Scott Delancey]

> My question for the list:  Have you (or anyone you know of) investigated
> the effect of either the animacy of the object located (Talmy's Figure)
> or the animacy of the reference object (Talmy's Ground) on the use of
> spatial relational terms?

Not sure exactly what you're looking for here.  There are languages
(the ones I can think of offhand are Tibeto-Burman, but there are
others) where you can't use the same locative construction with a
human as with an inanimate Ground.  (I'm not sure offhand what happens
with non-human animates).  I.e. you can say 'The child ran to the door'
with a simple locative construction, but to say 'The child ran to his
father' you need a relator noun construction, you can't just put the
locative marker directly on 'father'.  Is this any use to you?

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html