[Lingtyp] ‘Ostensive’ use of a goal case

[Riccardo Giomi]

Dear Marius,

I cannot think of any direct parallel in other languages, but a few
processes of grammaticalization that eventually lead from locative to a
meaning somehow similar to the one you illustrate do come to mind. The
problem is I have no idea whether the relevant intermediate stages also
exist (or can be reconstructed) for Tibetan, so what follows may well be
totally useless..

In the first place, locatives (of various types) are a well-known source
for standard-of-comparison markers, and the latter are often(ish) found to
turn into superlative markers; in turn, superlatives are used in various
languages to express high degree (with no strictly 'superlative' or
comparative implication). For examples of locative>comparative and
comparative>superlative, see Kuteva et al. (2019).

That said, a good part of the answer to your question depends on how
exactly you would characterize the function of the Tibetan construction.
>From the examples you give, a pragmatic meaning of emphasis, exclamation or
perhaps mirativity would seem to be involved; if this is the case, another
development that might perhaps be relevant is that of Chinese *di>de*,
which according to Yap, Choi and Cheung (2010) started out as a lexical
noun meaning 'bottom', then turned into a locative marker, and through a
series of further developments eventually acquired a discourse-marker use
of reinforcing the speaker's stance (which is a type of emphasis, as I
interpret it).

Finally, Radetzky (2002) discusses the developmet of Huallaga Quechua
*-qa *from
locative to topic and contrast marker -- a function that is of course
different from emphasis or mirativity as such, but still falls within the
vast realm of (linguistically encoded) pragmatics; contrast markers, in
particular, are prone to acquire emphatic meanings (e.g. Italian *ma*,
'but'). By the way, Radetzky mentions Ancient Greek *de *and Japanese *wa *as
cross-linguistic parallels to the Quechua case.

As I said, I have no idea whether this can be helpful at all!

Best wishes,
Riccardo

*References*

*Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha
Rhee. 2019. *World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, *2nd edition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.*

*Radetzky, Paula. 2002. *The functions and evolution of topic and focus
markers.* Ph.D. dissertation. Berkeley: University of California.*

*Yap, Foong Ha, Pik-ling Choi & Kam Siu Cheung. 2010. Delexicalizing di:
How a Chinese noun has evolved into an attitudinal nominalizer. In An Van
linden, Jean-Christophe Verstraete & Kristin Davidse (eds.),* Formal
evidence in grammaticalization research* (Typological Studies in Language
94), 63-92. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.*


zemp marius <zemp.marius at gmail.com> escreveu no dia segunda, 28/02/2022
à(s) 14:26:

> Dear colleagues,
>
>
>
> the two Written Tibetan examples (from Beyer 1992: 384) presented below
> illustrate the construction I’m interested in:
>
>
>
> *khyi che-ba-la*
>
> dog big-nlzr-??
>
> ‘That dog is really big!/How big that dog is!’
>
>
>
> *gnam sdug-pa-la*
>
> sky beautiful-nlzr-??
>
> ‘The sky is so beautiful!/What a beautiful sky!’
>
>
>
> According to Beyer (ibid.), this construction “consists of a nominalized
> proposition followed by the locus particle -*la*, yielding an extreme
> degree of some variable factor, which is expressed by the nominalized verb,
> usually stative.”
>
>
>
> While I think an adequate label for the function served by -*la* in these
> examples might be ‘ostensive’, my hypothesis is that this -*la* derives
> from the goal case -*la* of the same language. Unfortunately, I am unable
> to back this with any cross-linguistic parallels – Have any of you come
> across a goal case (or perhaps also a postposition meaning ‘to’) being used
> in a similar way in any of the languages you work with?
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance for your help!
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Marius
>
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