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?