Diuxi Mixtec Verbs of Motion and Arrival

A Typology of the Path of Deictic Motion Verbs as Path-Conflating Verbs: The Entailment of Arrival and the Deictic Center

“…Otomanguean languages, languages of central and southern Mexico, exhibit a very different kind of Vectors of the Path as documented in Texmelucan Zapotec (Speck and Pickett 1976), Isthmus Zapotec (Pickett 1976), and Diuxi Mixtec (Kuiper and Merrifield 1975). In these languages, (some) deictic motion verbs express a "round trip" (Kuiper and Merrifield 1975: 32) or "two-way motion" (Pickett 1976: 163).…”

“…the start point of the motion described by the two-way going verb, as is the case of the two-way going verbs in Texmelucan Zapotec. The system of the deictic motion verbs in Diuxi Mixtec is somehow more complicated as analyzed by Kuiper and Merrifield (1975). As shown in (17), it includes two one-way coming verbs, ndisi and vásí, and two one-way going verbs, núʔú and hį ʔį , and they are cross-classified according to whether or not the Ground is a Base of the Figure, as is the case in Texmelucan Zapotec.…”

“…Deictic motion verbs in Diuxi Mixtec (Kuiper and Merrifield 1975) ndisi 'come 1 (come toward a Base)' vásí 'come 2 (come toward a non-Base)' kiši 'come toward a non-Base and return' núʔú 'go 1 (go toward a Base)' hį ʔį 'go 2 (go toward a non-Base)' šę́ʔę́ 'go toward a non-Base and return' vásí 'come 2 ' "MOVE TOWARD a point which is the location of the speaker AND which is not a Base of the Figure" kiši 'come' "MOVE TOWARD a start point VIA a point which is the location of the speaker AND which is not a Base of the Figure" the going verbs in Diuxi Mixtec núʔú 'go 1 ' "MOVE TOWARD a point which is not the location of the speaker AND which is a Base of the Figure" The distribution of deictic motion verbs in all three languages discussed in this section, Texmelucan Zapotec, Isthmus Zapotec, and Diuxi Mixtec, is more complicated in that those languages incorporate the notion of a Base of the Figure as a component of the Ground and contain some verbs which lexically express a two-way motion. They consequently give rise to a more complicated system which cannot directly be mapped onto the typical two-member system with a single coming verb and a single going verb, like that of English.…”

“…(19) the coming verbs in Diuxi Mixtec ndisi 'come 1 ' "MOVE TOWARD a point which is the location of the speaker AND which is a Base of the Figure" 9 In spite of the claim that all deictic motion verbs express the Motion with an unbounded Path, every example which illustrates the point contains one of the two one-way going verbs núʔú and hį ʔį in Kuiper and Merrifield (1975). Furthermore, in spite of their claim that it expresses an unbounded Path, a one-way coming verb vásí 'come2' is said to be translatable as perfect in English "because of the implication that the Agent [ Figure] remains at Goal [Ground]" at the utterance time as in: (i) Diuxi Mixtec (Kuiper and Merrifield 1975: 37; the gloss is given by the present author) váší-te núndúa CMPL.come-he Oaxaca 'He has come to Oaxaca.'…”

“…The implication that the Figure is located at the Ground at the utterance time seems to indicate, contrary to the authors' claim, that the one-way coming verb vásí entails the arrival of the Figure. Even if that is the case, however, the claim of the present paper still holds that if a one-way Path is bounded, it must be the end point of a motion described as coming. 10 It is not clear from Kuiper and Merrifield (1975) whether the location of the addressee plays the role of the Ground of the coming verbs.…”