[Lingtyp] motion verbs

[Jess Tauber]

Nanai, a Manchu-Tungus language from East Central Asia, has a largish
system of ideophones. Bi- or multi-syllable mimetics are largely composed
of a first syllable marking properties of some figural object followed by
suffixes marking the larger spatiotemporal context, INCLUDING specific
suffixes marking 'motion' in general. Mongolic languages, which also have
large ideophonic systems, also have specific suffixes which make the figure
possess a 'dynamic' (as opposed to 'static') aspect. Such dynamic senses
don't necessarily involve translational symmetry operations- other symmetry
transitions are just as good (for example reverberation in place).

These suffixes, largely limited to ideophones, can be replaced by actual
motion verbs involving the ideophone root preceding it in a light-verb
constructional context.

Jess Tauber

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On Mon, Jun 6, 2022 at 10:36 AM Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu> wrote:

> Dear Sergey — Interesting question! I don’t think there’s anything in the
> grammar of most languages that corresponds to or expresses the concept of
> ‘motion.’
>
> The various subclasses of motion verbs can be defined on semantic grounds:
> path verbs entail change of location; manner verbs describe activities of
> agents/effectors that can cause change of location or describe change of
> orientation in those same agents/effectors; transport verbs are either
> causative path verbs or locate an object on a carrier (‘carry on back’,
> ‘carry on hip’, etc.), and so on.
>
> But there’s no overarching definition that would encompass all those
> subclasses, but no events that don’t involve motion. So a definition such
> as ’The class of all verbs of a given language that is used to describe
> exclusively motion events’ can at best be met disjunctively and thus
> doesn’t define the most “natural” concept.
>
> The supposedly primitive concept ‘motion’ apparently just isn’t.
>
> An important reference on the typology of motion verbs is Wälchli (2009).
>
> HTH! — Juergen
>
> Wälchli, B. (2009). Motion events in parallel texts: A study in
> primary-data typology. Habilitation thesis, University of Bern.
>
>
> > On Jun 6, 2022, at 9:50 AM, Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> >  How do we properly define the concept “motion verb”? I am especially
> interested in the telic variety, both transitive and intransitive ones.
> >
> >  Best wishes,
> >
> >
> > Sergey
> >
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> --
> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University at Buffalo
>
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