Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Bernhard Wälchli and Fernando Zúñiga

The typology of head and dependent marking in displacement.
waelchli@isw.unibe.ch, zuniga@uni-leipzig.de
 

The clause Mary went down out of the house across the garden to the rubbish skip expresses displacement, i.e. how a figure changes place in relation to the ground. Displacement can be expressed essentially in three different macro-positions in the clause, in the verb or verb stem (went), in a position close to the verb stem, be it verbal affixes or particles (down), and in adpositions or case markers which are associated with noun phrases expressing local reference points (out of, across, to). Each of these three macro-positions, the verbal, the adverbal, and the adnominal one, may be expressed by more than one displacement marker, e.g. several verbal displacement markers in serial verb constructions or several adnominal markers as in the English example above and each position may be missing, even the verbal one as in Out! There are also intermediate markers, which is partly due to intermediate stages of grammaticalization, e.g. serial verbs (verbal) which have almost become adpositions (adnominal), or local adverbs which have almost become adpositions (such as out in out of). In some languages it is even problematic to identify verbal stems (“bipartite stems”) in motion verbs.

Typology of motion and location until now has been mainly concerned either with lexicalization strategies in verbs or with adpositions and case. The paper claims that verbal, adverbal, and adnominal markers of displacement form a functional unit and must be considered together in the same way as verbal and nominal morphology for alignment (case, personal affixes) must be considered in their interplay as head and dependent marking.
In the first part of the paper some major variables in the typology of displacement are investigated in parallel texts in a sample of 120 languages from about 35 linguistic stocks from all continents:

a) Are the major kinds of displacement (IN, OUT, UP, DOWN) systematically or at least partly distinguished by verbs?
b) To which extent is displacement encoded by auxiliary verbs and adverbal displacement markers?
c) Are source and goal distinguished by adnominal displacement markers?
d) Is location (surface, interior, proximity, contact) distinguished by adnominal displacement markers?
e) Can there be more than one explicit local reference point per verb (such as in the English example above)?

It is discussed how these variables interact with each other cross-linguistically, which are the cross-linguistic default values and which are the major areal-typological patterns.

In the second part of the paper, displacement marking in three languages, Basque, Mapudungun, and Navajo, is considered. Navajo and Mapudungun are chosen because they are at extreme opposite poles in the typology in respect to verbal and adnominal displacement marking. Both languages have, however, in common that they have a certain degree of adverbal displacement marking. Navajo almost completely lacks verbal displacement marking. Displacement is expressed by postpositions and verbal prefixes. Mapundungun, on the other hand, almost completely lacks adnominal displacement marking. Displacement is encoded in verbs and in verbal suffixes. Basque is chosen because it corresponds more or less to the cross-linguistic default for displacement encoding: dominant verbal marking with an adnominal distinction of source and goal and with a very low level of adverbal marking and secondary directional verbs. Nevertheless, displacement in Basque has some highly specific features, notably the distinction of relative and absolute displacement in verbs.