[Lingtyp] spatial deictic transfer

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Sergey – Three things come to mind. First, a classic:

Wilkins, D. P., & D. Hill. (1995). When "go" means "come": Questioning the basicness of basic motion verbs. Cognitive Linguistics 6(2/3): 209-259.

Secondly, my colleague Gladys Camacho Rios reports that in South Bolivian Quechua (SBQ), the same associated motion (AM) marker expresses motion toward DC when combined with path verbs (acting as a directional) and motion away from DC when combined with non-motion verbs (including manner verbs, although apparently there is some fluidity here depending on context).

And, at the NAMED 2022 symposium at Kyoto, where Gladys presented her work, Daniel Ross and colleagues presented a typological study that suggested that there is in fact some typological regularity to the SBQ pattern, perhaps to the extent that across languages, directionals encode most commonly motion toward DC (ventive) and AM marker motion away from DC (itive).

Camacho Rios, G. (2022). Complex associated motion morphemes in South Bolivian Quechua. Named 2022: Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description 2022. Kyoto University.

Ross, D., J. Lovestrand, & B. Persohn. (2022). Deictic location in verb morphology: Between deictic directionals and associated motion. Named 2022: Neglected Aspects of Motion-Event Description 2022. Kyoto University.

And lastly, speaking of directionals and AM, you might of course find more leads in the recent (fantastic!) volume by Guillaume & Koch:

Guillaume, A. & H. Koch (eds.). (2021). Associated Motion. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692099

Best -- Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com>
Date: Friday, March 24, 2023 at 12:42 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] spatial deictic transfer
Dear colleagues,
I am working on the “Ventive” marker in Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian, two East Semitic varieties of the early second millennium BC, both with extensive and reasonably well understood epistolary corpora of private correspondence. The “Ventive” is a directional marker cliticized on motion verbs to indicate motion towards a deictic centre (DC). In the default case, the DC is the location of the speaker/writer, and the Ventive is obligatory in this context. But this marker often appears on verbs describing translocation towards THOU (the addressee of the respective letter), and – though less frequently – towards other goals.
I believe that to encode the motion towards the respective speaker/writer is the primordial and “natural” function of this marker, while the other usages represent “deictic transfers”, somewhat comparable to Bühler’s Deixis am Phantasma. I.e., a “deictic transfer” happens by virtue of the marker’s deictic (or “shifer”, in the sense of Roman Jakobson) nature.
Could you please suggest to me some cross-linguistic analogies and typological studies of spatial deictic shifts, migration of the DC from the speaker to something else?
Thank you very much,
Sergey
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