Associated motion and direction in South Bolivian Quechua
Linguistics Fridays Colloquia talk
University of Texas at Austin
Online
(Email rashields@wisc.edu for the link)
This talk discusses associated motion (AM)/directional polysemy in an undocumented variety of South Bolivian Quechua (SBQ). To understand the orientation of this polysemy, the deictic center must be the speaker, the place the speaker lives or the surrounding area. AM expresses the motion of the subject away from the deictic center towards another place and performs the main verb event as in (1). The directional meaning adds a path towards the deictic point as in (2).
(1) kunán qaramusaq ovejasman
kunán qara-mu-saq oveja-s-man
now.TOP feed-GO&DO-1SG.FUT sheep-PL-to
‘Now I will go and feed the sheep.’ (Away from the deictic center)
(2) Maria-q-ta-pis nuqa q’ipi-mu-rqa-ni
Maria-AG-ACC-also 1SG carry.on.back-DIR-PST-1SG
‘Yeah, even the big pots Maria owns, I carried them by back’ (Towards deictic center)
In this talk, I show that there is a large inventory of AM/directional morphemes compared to what has been reported in previous work on SBQ (see, Garland D., et al 1971, Muysken 1986, Herrero & Sanchez 1978, Van de Kerke 1993 and Plaza 2009). My analysis is grounded in a large spontaneous corpus collected solely by interacting in SBQ with the last elders left in a rural town. The analysis offers native speaker perspectives to show different results based on verb classification, arguments that AM/Polysemic suffixes license.
