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Re: Adposition or Case for Ground of Motion

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 20, 2005, 12:52
* caeruleancentaur said on 2005-09-20 12:02:16 +0200
> * Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@N...> wrote: > > >Similarly, surely: I go the-house-GROUND would mean I go away from > >the house since go encodes path away from ground. > > Why could it not equally mean "I go out of the house" or "I go around > the house" or "I go by the house" or "I go into the house" or "I go > through the house" or "I go on top of the house," etc.? Why does "go" > exclusively encode "away from?
Agreed. AFMCL, until this year, Taruven lacked a word for both "go" and "come". Now it has a word that means both. This is possible because T. has some rather complex locative "cases", moving the location-information from the meaning of the verb to the end of the noun. As For Linguistics, this brings us into very interesting territory that I seem to recall have been discussed here before, namely what meaning is covered by verbs contra adverbs. In English, we have "It floated down the stream", where the manner of movement is part of the verb, while in other languages one says something akin to "He downwards_moved the stream floatingly", moving the manner out of the verb and into an adverb. Talmy has looked into this and the keywords to search for are "path manner Talmy". Two links: Directed motion in english and spanish: http://elies.rediris.es/elies11/index.Htm The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events http://ihd.berkeley.edu/linguistictypologyofmotionevents.pdf The use of the frog picture-story (as described in the above papers) is very interesting. Unfortunately it seems that book is out of print, but maybe we could make our own picture-story to then "translate" into our own languages? t.

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taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>