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On the nature of goal marking and delimitation: Evidence from Japanese1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2008

JOHN BEAVERS
JOHN BEAVERS*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
*
Author's address: Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, B5100, Austin, TX 78712-0198, U.S.A. [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates two ways goals of motion events can be expressed in so-called ‘verb-framed’ languages (Talmy 2000), focusing on the Japanese postpositions -made and -ni. It is typically assumed that these postpositions are both goal-markers, but differ in the exact goal semantics they encode, giving rise to non-overlapping distributions. Based on a range of distributional differences, I argue instead that they are more radically distinct than this: -made marks the endpoint of event participants (including but not limited to paths of motion), while -ni is a dative case that marks the goal argument of motion verbs. This suggests that it is possible for two functionally distinct participant markers to converge and give the appearance of being alternate ways of realizing the ‘same’ participant. Furthermore, adpositions such as -made, an inherently non-motion-encoding resource, represent an understudied strategy for marking goals across languages, something that has ramifications for how motion typologies are constructed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 283 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[1]

My initial investigations into this topic were conducted in the summer of 2001 with the support of the NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research BCS-0004437 to Beth Levin. I would like to thank David Oshima for his native speaker judgments, thoughtful discussion, and patience in helping me get a handle on the data presented here. I am also indebted to Tsuguro Nakamura for his extensive comments and discussion. I would also like to thank Tim Baldwin, Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Olivier Bonami, Bruno Estigarribia, Hana Filip, Itamar Francez, Iván García, Mika Hama, Caroline Heycock, Masayo Iida, Beth Levin, Ivan Sag, Peter Sells, Dan Slobin, Natsuko Tsujimura, Maarika Traat, Kiyoko Uchiyama, and audiences at the 2003 ACL-SIGSEM workshop on prepositions at Toulouse and the Stanford Semantics Workshop for their help and comments. I would also like to thank three anonymous Journal of Linguistics reviewers for their extensive and insightful feedback. I am also grateful to Ewa Jaworska for her formatting help.

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