2022. The interaction of motion event (sub)components in Spanish motion verbs (original) (raw)

Spanish, as a Romance language, can be considered a verb-framed language in Talmy's (1985, 1991) framework or a head path-coding language in Matsumoto's (2003, 2020, this volume) terminology. This means that the information related to the Path of motion is usually encoded in the main verb. Following Talmy's (2000) framework, the semantic component of Path covers three subcomponents: Vector that includes different types of trajectories-source, goals, etc., Conformation or the shape or geometric complex of Path, and Deictic or the motion to/from speaker and addressee). These subcomponents are illustrated in examples (1-3) respectively. (1) Vector El chico entra en la tienda Lit. 'The boy enters in the shop' (2) Conformation El chico rodea la casa Lit. 'The boy goes.around the house' (3) Deixis El chico viene del colegio Lit. 'The boy comes of-the school' Other authors, however, argue that these subcomponents may be worth analyzing separately given their own role in the configuration of the motion event in some languages. Deixis is such an element. Matsumoto (this volume) summarises some of the reasons why Deixis should be considered a different semantic component. First, it is always lexicalised even in languages with poor path verb repertoires. Second, it often has its own independent morphosyntactic slot (e.g. certain position in a serial verb, specific affix, etc.). Third, the use of Path and Deixis across languages does not always correlate; that is, when comparing two languages, for example, they might behave similarly with respect to Path but they might not do so in the case of Deixis, or vice versa 1. As far as Spanish is concerned, Deixis does not have a special encoding slot different from any of the slots or resources available to codify information about other semantic components. In other words, Deixis can be expressed in main verbs such as 1 In order to avoid ambiguity in the use of the term Path (Talmy's view or Matsumoto's view), this paper will treat Path and Deixis as separate elements, unless specifically stated.