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Associated motion, associated posture and imperfective aspect in Tacana (Amazonian Bolivia)

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This paper is the first detailed description of the exceptionally rich subsystem of verbal inflections that express imperfective aspect in Tacana, an endangered and underdescribed language from the Takanan family. The unusually high degree of elaboration of this system, which includes nine members in paradigmatic opposition, is achieved by co-expressing imperfective aspect with spatial meanings taken from two distinct categories: associated motion (with five values: ‘going’, ‘coming’, ‘going back’, ‘coming back’, ‘wandering’) and what I will call “associated posture” (with three values: ‘standing’, ‘lying/bending’, ‘hanging’). The ninth member is a default imperfective marker that does not carry any spatial meaning. The paper challenges linguistic theories that consider grammatical(izable) concepts as belonging to a strictly limited range of notional domains from which motion and posture are excluded. Additionally, the paper provides strong support for a new comparative concept of “associated posture” in linguistics.

Keywords: grammar of space, motion, posture, imperfective aspect, inflectional morphology, Amazonian languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Associated motion and associated posture
  • 3.Preliminary information
    • 3.1Tacana and its speakers
    • 3.2The data for this study
    • 3.3Predicate structure
    • 3.4Expression of motion and posture in the verbal predicate
  • 4.Inflectional AM, AP and default imperfective circumfixes
    • 4.1TAM inflectional morphology
    • 4.2Morphological variants
    • 4.3Prefixal and suffixal parts of the imperfective circumfixes
    • 4.4Frequency of use
    • 4.5Imperfective meanings
  • 5.Spatial semantics of AM imperfective circumfixes
    • 5.1 e‑…-'u ‘ipfv.going’ & e-…-siu ‘ipfv.coming’
    • 5.2 e-…-buyu ‘ipfv.going_back’ & e-…-beyu ‘ipfv.coming_back’
    • 5.3 e‑…‑niuneti(a) ‘ipfv.wandering’
    • 5.4AM proper versus pure directional meanings
    • 5.5AM circumfixes with the polyfunctional verb pu ‘be (located), do, say, etc.’
    • 5.6Distribution of the different uses of AM imperfective circumfixes
  • 6.Spatial semantics of AP imperfective circumfixes
    • 6.1 e‑…‑(n)eti / e‑…‑netia ‘ipfv.standing’
    • 6.2 e-…-sa ‘ipfv.lying/bending’
    • 6.3 e-…-bade ‘ipfv.hanging’
  • 7.Absence of spatial semantics in the default imperfective circumfix e‑…‑(a)ni / e‑…‑inia ‘ipfv.dflt’
  • 8.Previous analyses of AM, AP and default imperfective markers
  • 9.Lexical counterparts and diachrony
  • 10.Grammatical status of the AM and AP imperfective circumfixes
  • 11.AM and AP in Ese Ejja
  • 12.Summary and discussion of the relevance of the Tacana AM and AP imperfective markers for linguistic theory
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 29 April 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.21045.gui
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