[Lingtyp] spatial deictic markers on 1st person verbs

[Takahiro Morita]

Dear Sergey, 

Maybe the following reference is useful for you. 

Matsumoto, Y., Akita, K., & Takahashi, K. 2017. The functional nature of deictic verbs and the coding patterns of Deixis: An experimental study in English, Japanese, and Thai. In I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano (Ed.), Motion and space across languages (95–122). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

I think that the speaker’s “here” space is elastic enough to false our belief (verbs of coming express a motion “spatially” toward the speaker) depending on the relationship between the speaker and a mover. This paper provides us with an empirical proof that this relationship is spatially or psychologically constructed, and it can be variable depending on languages.  


Takahiro Morita, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University
Yoshidanihonmatsucho, Sakyo-ku
Kyoto, 606-8501
morita.takahiro.8r at kyoto-u.ac.jp



> On Aug 4, 2021, at 23:28 , Riccardo Giomi <rgiomi at campus.ul.pt> wrote:
> 
> Dear Sergey,
> 
> I don't have references to published work to share, nor data concerning amazing crosslinguistic variation, but as an Italian who has been living in Portugal for years I can tell you I have long been struggling with the different uses of the movement verbs andare/venire (It.) and ir/vir (Pt) -- resulting in my Portuguese friends mercilessly laughing at my mistakes. Thing is in Italian you regularly use the verb venire ('come') not only to speak of the addressee (or someone else) joining the speaker but also when it is the speaker or someone else that joins the addressee, whereas in Portuguese vir ('come') seems to be much more rigidly speaker-bound. Thus, if you want to say you are going to join the addressee, in Italian you will say Vengo là ('I come there') but in (European) Portuguese you cannot say #Venho aí / #Venho lá but you have to say Vou aí ('I go there(where you are)') if you mean you are going to join the addressee at her/his current location, or Vou lá ('I go there(where neither of us currently is)') if you mean you will join the addressee in some other place. As far as I can tell, there does not seem to be any relation to the utterance or event time -- the same contrasts exist regardless of the time reference.
> 
> The same rule holds with the verbs levar ('bring sth away from the speaker') and trazer ('bring sth to the speaker'): apparently, you can only say Traz-me isso ('bring me that') and Eu levo-te isto ('I bring you this'), never #Leva-me isso or #Eu trago-te isto.
> 
> Hope this can help some way, best wishes,
> Riccardo
> 
> Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com> escreveu no dia quarta, 4/08/2021 à(s) 14:52:
> Dear all,
> 
> What do we know, cross-linguistically, about spatial deictic markers on verbs of going/coming used in the first person, probably depending on the relationship between the utterance time and the event time?  
> 
> Thus, ‘I came/went here/there’ and ‘I shall come/go here/there’; ‘I arrived there (but I am longer there at the speech time)’, etc. 
> 
> I am interested in the eventual contrasts in the encoding of the direction of the speaker’s motion depending on this kind of variables.
> 
>  I am thinking in the first place about communication of the speaker with an addressee (including written messages), not about narratives.
> 
> Thank you very much,
> 
> Sergey
> 
>  
>  
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> 
> -- 
> Riccardo Giomi, Ph.D.
> Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (FLUL)
> Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica (DLGR)
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