Associated motion, associated posture and imperfective aspect in Tacana (Amazonian Bolivia)

Abstract

Abstract This paper is the first detailed description of the exceptionally rich subsystem of verbal inflections that express imperfective aspect in Tacana, an endangered and underdescribed language from the Takanan family. The unusually high degree of elaboration of this system, which includes nine members in paradigmatic opposition, is achieved by co-expressing imperfective aspect with spatial meanings taken from two distinct categories: associated motion (with five values: ‘going’, ‘coming’, ‘going back’, ‘coming back’, ‘wandering’) and what I will call “associated posture” (with three values: ‘standing’, ‘lying/bending’, ‘hanging’). The ninth member is a default imperfective marker that does not carry any spatial meaning. The paper challenges linguistic theories that consider grammatical(izable) concepts as belonging to a strictly limited range of notional domains from which motion and posture are excluded. Additionally, the paper provides strong support for a new comparative concept of “associated posture” in linguistics.