Source-Goal (in)difference and the typology of motion events in the clause

Abstract

Starting from the clause, the functional domain of motion events with the three loci Verbal, Adnominal, and Adverbal, the paper investigates various grammatical and lexical means of expression for the encoding of the local roles Source and Goal in a sample of 117 languages and in more detail in one language with grammatically indifferent Source-Goal encoding, Mapudungun. It is found that the feature Source-Goal (in)difference forms a global cline with Consistent languages clustering in Eurasia and Indifferent languages being most frequent in the New World.

Recent developments and open questions in the field of semantic roles

“…We may therefore conclude that derived constructions allow us to make some differences that are not possible in basic constructions, where the form overrides meaning. A similar case is attested in German, where the passive Agent can be marked with three prepositions, von 'of ' , durch 'through' , and mit 'with' , depending on the semantic nature of the Agent (see also Wälchli and Zúñiga 2006 for more examples and discussion). In this section, we have briefly discussed the interplay between form and meaning in the semantic role assignment.…”

“…Moreover, there are languages in which the intuitively plausible roles of Goal and Source are not explicitly distinguished, but the distinction may be based, for example, only (or at least primarily) on verbal semantics. The distinction may also be only pragmatic in that a given language lacks both grammatical and lexical means to distinguish between the roles, but the intended reading is inferable only from contextual cues (see Wälchli & Zúñiga 2006 for a more detailed discussion of this). Again, there are numerous languages in which the distinction is explicit, and we conceptualize motion events as obligatorily involving a source and a goal, but they can often be left out from linguistic expressions, as in she is running.…”

Iconicity of sequence in source and goal encoding in two Papuan languages of south-east Indonesia

“…In this, source and goal are not distinguished by morpheme, but by their position in the clause. That is, I show that there are languages which, whilst morphologically 'indifferent' to the source-goal distinction in the sense of Wälchli and Zúñiga's (2006) typology, syntactically distinguish source and goal by exploiting iconicity of sequence in their coding.…”

“…Wälchli (2001) examines different 'loci' in displacement (change of location events), and creates a typology of adnominal (adpositional and case-marking) flagging of Grounds. Wälchli and Zúñiga (2006) present a cross-linguistic study of whether languages differentiate source and goal Grounds in displacement events. In their resulting typology, they identify three types of source-goal (in)difference: (i) Consistent Type, (ii) Mixed Type, and (iii) Indifferent Type.…”

Mapping out the Source domain

“…Bohnemeyer & Stolz 2006, Levinson 1996, Levinson & Meira 2003, Luraghi & Cuzzolin 2007, Nikitina 2009, Šarić 2003, Wälchli & Zúñiga 2006. 1 The focus of interest in this paper is the interrelationship between Location, Goal, and Source, which are commonly taken as fundamental spatial relations encoded by languages.…”