Deictic directionals revisited in the light of advances in typology
Abstract
This study explores the issue of Associated Motion (hereafter AM) in five languages spoken in Africa and Asia. We investigate grammatical morphemes whose function is to add a motion process to the event encoded in the verb expressing the main (non-motion) event, and to specify the temporal sequence of these two events (motion-prior-to-action or motion-subsequent-to-action). We show that an AM analysis adequately accounts for the function of morphemes previously considered as directionals in Wolof and Burmese, whereas in Sereer, Northern Mandarin and Japanese, AM markers are concurring with morphemes marking deictic orientation. Our results support recent studies showing that AM is a widespread linguistic phenomenon, and thus raise the question of the place of AM in a typology of motion events.