[Lingtyp] Grammatcalization of 'road/way/path'.

[Jussi Ylikoski]

Dear Dmitri,

This may not be that exciting semantically, but here are two examples from Finnic (Uralic) languages:

In Finnish, a case-like "prolative" suffix -(i)tse can be attached to nouns like tie 'way; road', yielding adverbs like teitse 'along a road'. Incidentally, teitse has aquired an instrumental meaning 'by way of', and has itself become a suffix that can be attached to nouns denoting judicial and administrative procedures, means and channels of communication, and medical procedures and instruments etc.: sopimusteitse 'by (way of) agreement' (← sopimus 'agreement; contract'), satelliittiteitse 'by satellite' (← satelliitti 'satellite'), pisarateitse 'via droplet (aerosol) transmission' (← pisara 'drop'), and laparotomiateitse 'via laparotomy' (← laparotomia 'laparotomy'). I have described the phenomenon in a paper in Finnish, with an English summary "On Finnish prolatives and instrumentals: -(i)tse and -teitse in between grammar and lexicon" found at https://journal.fi/sananjalka/article/view/69978/37590 .

In Estonian, the adessive case form of tee 'way; road' (cognate of Finnish tie id.) is also used as a kind of postposition with an instrumental meaning: telefoni teel 'by telephone', korruptsiooni teel 'by corruption' etc.

Best regards,

Jussi


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Frá: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> fyrir hönd Dmitri Sitchinava <mitrius at gmail.com>
Sent: fimmtudagur, 14. janúar 2021 21:10
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Efni: [Lingtyp] Grammatcalization of 'road/way/path'.

Dear typologists.

Me and my colleague are interested in grammaticalization patterns with nouns meaning 'road/way/path'.

In Svorou (1994) various examples of grammaticalization into spatial grams are provided, but examples beyond the spatial domain are probably even more interesting.
The pattern 'way/matter' is also well-known, but to give you a few more examples: English intensifier way too, French être en voie de and Swedish på väg att (~to be about to), German wegen 'because of'. The famous way-construction (to V one's way) is also worth mentioning.

We would appreciate it if you could help us to collect more data so that we could get a more diverse sample and would not miss some potentially interesting patterns.

Best
Dmitri
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