SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight the frequent occurrence of associated motion and compare the construction in 20 languages from the four main linguistic phyla of Africa. Associated motion is a strategy typical of Australian and South American languages whereby a motion event is subordinated to a verb’s event but is encoded by an affix from the semantic category of ‘associated motion’ (Koch, 1984) rather than by another verb or satellite clause. In this paper I show that associated motion is quite widespread in Africa, although overall little discussed. In the languages surveyed the structure exhibits the following particularities: (i) it is marked by satellites, which systematically also mark deictic path, (ii) it relates to the main verb in different ways depending on the event the latter encodes and the context, and (iii) it occurs with different lexical verb classes depending on the language. This study adds to the growing literature on the topic and seeks to highlight strong similarities between path expressions and the category of associated motion, currently ignored in the literature.