Title

Towards a typology of the imperative 'come!'-domain 

Abstract

Many languages have particles or suppletive verb forms for 'come!' and 'go!' different from the (non-imperative) verb stems for 'come' and 'go'. Ama (Left May, Papua New Guinea), for instance – a language with a rather rich set of imperative verbs – has kuku'come!', soi 'let's go!', awi 'wait!', fau 'look out!', fuo 'take it!', fuwoi 'move!' and kapu kapu'eat! [always reduplicated]' (Årsjö 1999: 45).
     As argued by Veselinova (2006: 146), suppletive imperatives for 'come!' and 'go!' are not just non-functional historical residues, but "lexical expressions for a category that is highly relevant to the sense of verbs which express motion, and are obviously very often used in the imperative". Interestingly, specific imperative 'come!'-markers also occur in languages such as Burarra, Navajo and Nunggubuyu that lack a distinction between 'go' and 'come' in non-imperative verb stems. In his seminal study on deictic motion verbs in Europe, Ricca (1993: 89) finds that there are some Slavic languages that distinguish 'come' and 'go' only in the imperative. Such observations may be reason enough to look at the imperative 'come!'-domain a bit closer from a massively cross-linguistic point of view (also including gesture and some sign languages). A very suitable material at least for written language is translations of the New Testament into many languages of the world, since these allow us to study the interplay of different marker types in language use and to compare languages with highly diverse genealogical affiliations on the maximally granular level of contextually embedded exemplars (albeit at the cost of considering translated language rather than original language use). 
     This talk will show that specific markers in the imperative 'come!'-domain are not rare from a cross-linguistic point of view. It seems that if a language makes a distinction between 'come' and 'go' in non-imperative contexts, it also makes a distinction between 'come' and 'go' in the imperative, whereas the opposite is not true. The typological evidence may then serve as a starting point for inquiring what is special about deictic motion in imperative and hortative contexts. Is imperative 'come!' maybe a prototype for 'come'?
     In a broader context, the special situation of the imperative 'come!'-domain must remind us of the fact that the study of motion events is not necessarily just lexical semantics. The lexicon interacts with grammar and discourse and semantics interacts with morphology and syntax. I will argue that the imperative 'come'-domain provides further reasons why the typology of motion events must be built bottom-up, as has been argued in Wälchli & Sölling (2013), and that the cross-linguistic diversity of motion event encoding calls for typological studies with moderately large or large samples of languages.

References

Årjö, Britten. 1999. Words in Ama. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. (MA-thesis, Uppsala Universitet) 
Ricca, Davide. 1993. I verbi deittici di movimento in Europa: una ricerca interlinguistica. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. 
Veselinova, Ljuba. 2006. Suppletion in verb paradigms. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Wälchli, Bernhard & Sölling, Arnd. 2013. The encoding of motion events: Building typology bottom-up from text data in many languages. In: Goschler, Juliana & Stefanowitsch, Anatol (eds.), Variation and Change in the Encoding of Motion Events, 77-113. Amsterdam: Benjamins

About the speaker

Bernhard Wälchli is professor in General Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.

Bernhard Wälchli’s profile

Contact

Welcome to contact us if you have questions about our seminars.
If you need a sign language interpreter, please let us know in advance.

Anna Sjöberg, PhD student
anna.sjoberg@ling.su.se

Carla Wikse Barrow, PhD student
carla.w.barrow@ling.su.se