[Lingtyp] motion verbs

[Guillaume Jacques]

I think that any definition of a motion verb should take into account the
concept of *associated motion*, about which a collective book edited by
Harold Koch and Antoine Guillaume was published last year.  A. Guillaume's
(2016) definition of AM is the following: "An AM marker is a grammatical
morpheme that is associated with the verb and that has among its possible
functions the coding of translational motion." The notion of *translational
motion* seems to me useful to define motion verbs too (as opposed to motion
involving part of the body, for instance).

In addition, a non-motion verb taking an associated motion marker is turned
into a motion verb, so that languages with grammaticalized AM have an open
class of motion verbs.


Reference
Guillaume, Antoine 2016 Associated motion in South America: Typological and
areal perspectives. Linguistic Typology, De Gruyter, 2016, 20 (1),
⟨10.1515/lingty-2016-0003⟩. ⟨halshs-01918336⟩
Guillaume, Antoine and Harold Koch 2021. Associated Motion. Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.

Le lun. 6 juin 2022 à 16:36, Juergen Bohnemeyer <jb77 at buffalo.edu> a écrit :

> 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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-- 
Guillaume Jacques

Directeur de recherches
CNRS (CRLAO) - EPHE- INALCO
https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=1XCp2-oAAAAJ&hl=fr
https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
<http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques>
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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