Associated motion and associated posture: Perspectives from the literature on lexical affixes and grammaticalization theory

Presentation by Antoine Guillaume, Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage.

Bionote

Antoine Guillaume holds a PhD in Linguistics from La Trobe University (Australia, awarded in 2004) and a Habilitation to Direct Research from Lumière Lyon 2 University (France, obtained in 2013). He is currently a Research Director at CNRS and a member of the Dynamique Du Langage (DDL) laboratory in Lyon, which he directed from 2018 to 2022.

His research focuses on the documentation and description of Takanan languages in the Bolivian and Peruvian Amazon, particularly Cavineña, Reyesano (Maropa), and Tacana. He also investigates specific morphosyntactic phenomena in these languages (e.g., associated motion and posture, argument structure), contributing to advancements in general and typological linguistics.

Among his key contributions are an extensive grammar of Cavineña, published in 2008 by De Gruyter, and a landmark volume on associated motion in the world's languages, co-edited with Harold Koch (Australian National University) and published by De Gruyter in 2021.

Abstract

The goal of this presentation is to discuss the spatial verbal categories of associated motion (AM) and associated posture (AP) from the perspectives of the literature on “lexical affixes” and grammaticalization theory.

AM and AP refer to morphemes that are associated with the verb and that have among their possible functions the coding of translational motion in the case of AM (Guillaume & Koch 2021) and postural meanings in the case of AP (Guillaume 2024). In some languages, AM and AP are expressed through forms that qualify, according to formal criteria, for a very advanced stage of grammaticalization. For instance, in Tacana (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia), they are integral components of an elaborate inflectional paradigm featuring nine imperfective circumfixes (Guillaume 2024).

AM and AP expressions, akin to those typically examined under the umbrella of “lexical affixes” (Mithun 1997; Mattissen 2017), pose an intriguing puzzle for traditional grammaticalization theory. They question the assumption, found in numerous works on grammaticalization, that (1) grammaticalizable concepts belong to a limited range of notional domains; (2) motion and posture are excluded from this range; (3) therefore, motion and posture meanings are necessarily lost (“bleached”) in the processes of grammaticalization.

In this talk, I will build on earlier presentations of this puzzle by Nicolle (2002; 2007) and Guillaume (2006; 2024). I will also explore this puzzle through the lens of the usage-based approach to grammatical status and grammaticalization proposed by Harder & Boye (2012) and its application to the domain of lexical affixes (Nielsen, Trondhjem & Boye Submitted).

Sources

Boye, Kasper & Peter Harder. 2012. A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization. Language 88(1). 1–44.

Guillaume, Antoine. 2006. La catégorie du “mouvement associé” en cavineña : Apport à une typologie de l’encodage du mouvement et de la trajectoire [The category of “associated motion” in Cavineña: Contribution to a typology of motion and path encoding]. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 101(1). 415–436.

Guillaume, Antoine. 2024. Associated motion, associated posture and imperfective aspect in Tacana (Amazonian Bolivia). Studies in Language 4. 851–908.

Guillaume, Antoine & Harold Koch. 2021. Introduction: Associated motion as a grammatical category in linguistic typology. In Antoine Guillaume & Harold Koch (eds.), Associated motion (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 64), 3–30. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Mattissen, Johanna. 2017. Sub-types of polysynthesis. In Michael D. Fortescue, Marianne Mithun & Nicholas Evans (eds.), The Oxford handbook of polysynthesis (Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics), 70–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mithun, Marianne. 1997. Lexical Affixes and Morphological Typology. In Joan L. Bybee, John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Essays on Language Function and Language Type, 357. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Nicolle, Steve. 2002. The grammaticalisation of movement verbs in Digo and English. Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique (11). 47–67.

Nicolle, Steve. 2007. The grammaticalization of tense markers : A pragmatic reanalysis. Cahiers Chronos 17. 47–65.

Nielsen, Mads, Naja Trondhjem & Kasper Boye. Submitted. Lexical affixes.