A Typology of the Ground of Deictic Motion Verbs As Path-Conflating Verbs: the Speaker, the Addressee, and Beyond

Abstract

A Typology of the Ground of Deictic Motion Verbs As Path-Conflating Verbs: the Speaker, the Addressee, and Beyond This paper examines typical deictic motion verbs come and go in different languages, Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Shibe, as well as other languages in the literature, using Talmy's framework for analyzing motion verbs. While his framework makes it possible to analyze and compare the lexical semantics of deictic motion verbs viewed as Path-conflating verbs, the actual characterization of the Ground, i.e. the deictic center, is far more complicated than suggested by Talmy: "toward the location of the speaker". The analysis of deictic motion verbs in various languages reveals that there is a cross-classified hierarchy among the elements which constitute the Ground: all languages take the location of the speaker at the utterance time as the deictic center while, in addition, the location of the addressee and/or the reference time locations play the role of the deictic center in some languages. Furthermore, it is shown that the Ground of the deictic motion verbs is relativized in some languages to the referent of a particular sentence element such as the subject of the matrix subject, rather than being anchored to the participants of the speech act, which are usually considered to determine the deictic center.