[Lingtyp] retrolative

[Bernhard Wälchli]

Dear Christian, dear all,

Up to this discussion I thought that there was the well-established term ROUND-TRIP (Christian actually mentions the label, but only in a translation, not as a term). See, for instance, Macaulay’s (1996) discussion of Mixtec motion verbs, where round-trip plays an important role. (But maybe you think weird neo-Latin items are generally better than plainly understandable English expressions as terms.)

However, I would like to pick up another issue. Of course, you can want to unite meanings such as
(i) ‘move from A to B and back to A; move (round-trip)’ and
(ii) ‘move from A for the purpose of picking up X at B and then to C [A can be C, but need not, you can fetch the axe from the shed while going to the woods from home.]’
in one comparative concept. But this does not seem to be particularly “fruitful” (Lazard 2002: 148) cross-linguistically as a “generalizing concept” (Dahl 2016). Languages lexicalizing ‘fetch / [German] holen’ do not generally distinguish ‘move (roundtrip)’ vs. ‘move (unidirectional)’ (and repeatedly moving back-and-forth as in David’s Georgian example is yet another thing), and if they do – as Finnish käydä ‘go (roundtrip)’ and hakea ‘fetch’ – not necessarily in a connected manner (see differences in case use in Johanna’s examples). Already within European ‘fetch/holen’ verbs, there are considerable differences in use. (For instance, Swedish hämta ‘fetch’ is strongly associated with picking up children from daycare where its antonym is lämna literally: “leave” ‘drop off’).

Note also that certain Central Eurasian languages, such as Mari (Uralic), make a distinction between (ii a) ‘fetch mass noun, in the most prototypical case: water’, which is expressed with a case (dative in Mari), in some languages it is an adposition, see (1), and (ii b) ‘pick up persons, fetch countable items’, which is expressed by “take”.

(1) Meadow Mari (Alhoniemi 1985: 53; writing ASCIIfied)
Tudo pamash deke vüd-lan oshkyl kolt-ysh
3SG spring to water-DAT walk AUX/send-PST.3SG
‘S/he walked to the spring to fetch water’ lit. "walked to the spring for water"

Alhoniemi (1985: 53) characterizes the function in (1) as follows: “tämä on eräänlainen finaaliadverbiaalin erikoistapaus” ‘this is a kind of special case of purpose adverbial’. Maybe not so strange then that many languages do not seem to lexicalize ‘fetch’ and often just have “take”. In purpose constructions such as ‘Y went (in order) to fetch/take X’, a special lexical verb is quite pleonastic. Which means that constructions might matter far beyond the serial verb constructions mentioned by Alex.

Generally, as long as abstract comparative concepts have not proven to be fruitful cross-linguistically, it may be good to keep semantic domains pretty granular for both description and cross-linguistical comparison. It is certainly useful to ask such questions as to how things such as the following are expressed:

(i) ‘X went to B (and came back).’
(ii) ‘X fetched water.’
(iii) ‘The parent picked up their child from daycare.’
(iv) ‘They moved back and forth repeatedly.’

But as long as no clear cross-linguistic pattern is established between the responses (for instance, as a semantic map), it does not make much sense to believe that they should necessarily be considered together. Put differently, saying that many languages have such a relation in their grammar (or lexicon), but that languages usually just embody one (any) of its possible manifestations is tantamount to saying that such an abstract general relation does not make sense from a cross-linguistic point of view.

Best wishes,
Bernhard Wälchli


Alhoniemi, Alho. 1985. Marin kielioppi. Helsinki. Suomalais-ugrilainen seura.

Dahl, Östen. 2016. Thoughts on language-specific and crosslinguistic entities. Linguistic Typology 20(2): 427–437.

Lazard, Gilbert. 2002. Transitivity revisited as an example of a more strict approach in typological research. Folia Linguistica 36. 141–190.

Macaulay, Monica. 1996. A Grammar of Chalcatongo Mixtec. University of California Publications in Linguistics 127. Berkeley: University of California Press.



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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 8, 2024 10:19 AM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: [Lingtyp] retrolative

Dear colleagues,

I was told occasionally that there is a local relation - let's call it retrolative - consisting of a movement to reference point R and back to the point of departure. In the languages that have it in their grammar, it would be in a paradigm with ablative, allative, perlative. Unless I am mistaken, English only has it embodied in the meaning of fetch, and likewise in German holen.

  1.  Is retrolative the right term, or is the relation known under a different term?
  2.  Please give me a representative example of the type 'Jane went to R round-trip' or 'Jane fetched the axe from the shed' using a retrolative case or adposition or a retrolative formative in some other structural category.

Thanks in advance,
Christian
--

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
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