The distributed expression of motion in German - satellites, morphosyntactic case-marking and pragmatic factors
(2021) NAMED: De/constructing motion events — Location: Paris, PSL (1.July.2021)
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- Since Talmy’s (1985; 2000) seminal work on satellite-framed vs. verb-framed languages it is well established that German constitutes a prototypical representative of the category of satellite-framed languages, as it expresses the path of motion preferably with satellites (Meex 2020). A further characteristic of satellite-framed languages is the salience of the manner dimension as co-event which has been claimed to be mainly expressed by the verb (Slobin 2006 and 2017; Talmy 2000 and 2017). But, as we show, the satellites can also contribute to the expression of the co-event (compare Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2017) and Filipovic & Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2015)), more particularly in the following German constructions: (i) so-called ‘verbless directives’ (Jacobs 2008), i.e. motion constructions without a verb, but consisting mainly of satellites (see example 1) or (ii) pleonastic motion constructions in which a satellite is duplicated (De Knop fc.) (see example 2). (1) Ab ins Bett! (lit. ‘off to bed!’) (2) Die Mutter setzt das Kind auf das Pferd drauf. (lit. ‚The mother sets the child on the horse upon’) (3) Alle laufen auf den Berg hinauf. In these examples the satellites are instantiated as autonomous particles, e.g. 'ab' in (1), prepositions, e.g. 'in' in (1) and 'auf' in (2), double particles like 'drauf' (2), sometimes even featuring deictic constituent like 'hin-' in 'hinauf' (3). With examples collected in the corpora from the Sketchengine and from the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim (DeReKo), we provide evidence for the complex nature and the role of the satellites characterized by a conflation of path, manner and deixis. The analysis also elaborates on the dominant role of the morpho-syntactic case-marking system in German which sustains the semantics of the satellites. Our presentation focuses on the co-event as it revisits and proposes an extended analysis of this concept in the above German constructions, thereby illustrating how satellites contribute to the expression of the co-event, either together with the verbs or without any verbs.
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De Knop, S., & Gallez, F. (2021). The distributed expression of motion in German - satellites, morphosyntactic case-marking and pragmatic factors. NAMED: De/constructing motion events, Paris, PSL. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/228402