SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The ambivalent cross-linguistic relationship between the categories of associated motion and deictic directionality has been noted in recent studies: they express different meanings but have complementary distributions and are frequently realised by the same exponents depending on their linguistic environment. My main aim in this paper is to address this yet unexplained theoretical and typological puzzle. Based on the properties and distributions of polysemous exponents across various languages indigenous to Africa, I develop a unifying semantic account of associated motion and deictic directionality. Following the views that paths can refer to events, that events are not necessarily atomic and can be decomposed into multiple temporally related sub-events, I argue that deictic directionality constitutes a subtype of associated motion. Like the latter, it is used to express complex events, differing only in how the motion it expresses temporally integrates with the event encoded by the host verb.