Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Adposition or Case for Ground of Motion

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 20, 2005, 7:26
>You seem to be using the concept of "ground" differently than I've seen in >the literature, e.g., Len Talmy's writings. "Ground" is usually meant to >refer to the background against which is set the participants and the >movement taking place relative to the perspective of those participants. >Therefore, to my mind, the house in your sentence functions in the >semantic relation of either SOURCE or GOAL, not GROUND. Consequently, >words such as "from" or "to" and their equivalents in other languages such >as ablative and allative cases would be appropriate as markers for the >SOURCE/GOAL semantic relations. > >
The ground is the point which the motion is relative to. come is a motion verb which encodes path towards ground (not necessarily reaching it)... you can say for instance "come to me" but not normally "go to me", since it's normal to consider yourself the point motion is relative to. Perhaps my examples were bad... I did rewrite them near the end. But if come means move towards ground, and I say something like: I come the-house-GROUND then surely it would mean: I come towards the house as I said when I rewrote my examples at the end of the message. Similarly, surely: I go the-house-GROUND would mean I go away from the house since go encodes path away from ground. Perhaps I'm just thinking about this wrong though... even if those examples are wrong, is there any language which uses an adposition or whatever exclusively to mark ground, which is not necessarily the same as location, destination, source etc?