3. Aspects of a typology of direction

Abstract

*Although direction plays an important role in the semantics of prepositions and verbs, thereare not many precise and systematic treatments of this notion. This article offers a characterization and typology of directionality, based on two algebraic properties of spatial paths: cumulativity and reversability. This typology makes clear how directionality relates to the aspectual property of telicity, it generates implicational predictions about directional marking in systems of cases and adpositions around the world, and it suggests broad parallels between the realizations of directionality in prepositions and verbs.Like all parts of speech, prepositions can be classified in different ways. When we focus on the semantic side of spatial prepositions, we find a major division between locative prepositions (like in and under) and directional prepositions (like into and through):(1) a.Alex is in/under the car.b. Alex went into/through the forest.Locative prepositions correspond to places (where something is), directional prepositions to paths (where something is going) (see Jackendoff 1983 and many others). Further classifications can be made within both locative and directional expressions, like the distinction of goal ('to'), source ('from') and route ('via') prepositions, for example. Such We can also classify prepositions as telic or atelic, according to the contribution that they make to the aspectual structure of a sentence:(2) Alex walked … a. … in the forest/towards the station/along the beach.b. … into the forest/to the station/around the barrier.According to the usual aspectual tests (Dowty 1979), prepositions like in, towards and along lead to atelic, unbounded aspect, while into, to and around make the sentence they modify telic, bounded in aspect. All locative prepositions are atelic, but directional prepositions can be telic or atelic, depending on their particular lexical definition.The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at classes of prepositions (section 1), building on the algebra of paths in Piñon (1993), Nam (2000), and Zwarts (2005), and toshow that this algebra allows a richer typology of direction than the one that has emerged in the linguistic literature (section 2). This typology does not only show us more clearly how the system of prepositions hangs together semantically and how the spatial and aspectual dimension relate (section 3 and section 4), but it also provides a basis for markedness patterns in the morphosyntax of directionality, whether expressed by adpositions or case markers (section 5). The directional typology that we find for prepositions can be extended to verb meanings, giving a partial typology of 'event shapes', similar to the more informal verb contours of Talmy (1978) and others (section 6). Paths and prepositionsBuilding on much earlier work on prepositions, I assume that the interpretation of directional prepositions is based on paths, more specifically, that a directional PP denotes a set of paths. 1A path can be taken as a directed curve, correspo...

General location across languages: On the division of labour between functional and lexical items in spatial categories

“…with "end-point" senses (e.g. on top of ) being a third possible type (Bennett 1975;Bowerman and Pederson 1992;Cresswell 1978;Gehrke 2008;Haselbach 2017;Jackendoff 1983Jackendoff , 1990Zwarts 2005Zwarts , 2008Zwarts and Winter 2000).…”

‘Ao contrário’, ‘do avesso’ e ‘de trás para frente’

“…Para podermos falar da trajetória do desenrolar de certos eventos, adotaremos a teoria proposta em Zwarts (2005;2008), cujo objetivo é justamente formalizar a noção de trajetória associada a diversos tipos de eventos, e também de operações que possam tomá-las como alvo.…”

interpretation of plural definites in discourse

“…The resulting complex predicate walked to the station should denote an achievement event, as a result (Parsons, 1990;Krifka, 1998;Kratzer, 2003;a.o.). So, a complex predicate can also determine whether a plural definite is interpreted as collective or distributive, in a compositional way (Brisson, 1998(Brisson, , 2003Zwarts, 2005Zwarts, , 2008a.o. ).…”