# The Source/Goal asymmetry in Negidal motion verbs

Laurène Barbier

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Laurène Barbier. The Source/Goal asymmetry in Negidal motion verbs. 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Aug 2024, Helsinki, Finland. hal-04913885

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Submitted on 27 Jan 2025

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# The Source/Goal asymmetry in Negidal motion verbs

Laurène Barbier

(Laboratoire Dynamique Du Language CNRS UMR 5596; Université Lumière Lyon 2)

Keywords: Source/Goal asymmetry, motion verbs, spatial events, Path, Tungusic

In the expression of Path of motion (Talmy 1895, 2000), a tendency among speakers of many languages to favour the expression of Goal-Grounds (an entity of reference that is the final part) to the detriment of Source-Grounds (the initial part) has been described in the literature (Ikegami 1987, Bourdin 1997). This phenomenon creates a spatial asymmetry, that has been observed at different levels of the linguistic structure, both semantic (types of semantic distinctions) and morphosyntactic (types and diversity of devices). It has also been shown that the degree and the manifestation of such asymmetry might vary across languages depending on the types of linguistic devices available in a given language and the semantic distinctions languages are sensitive to (Kopecka & Vuillermet 2021).

Therefore, research on languages less often described as part of studies on the Source/Goal asymmetry can shed new light on our understanding of cross-linguistic variability in this domain. The aim of the present study is to investigate the existence of such asymmetry in a language that has not been the subject of study in this domain of expression: Negidal (Tungusic). If attested, how does the asymmetry manifest itself in the morphosyntactic and semantic structure in Negidal? What is the degree of asymmetry? Is there variation in the expression of Source and Goal information depending on the types of motion event expressed?

In this study, the focus is on the Source/Goal asymmetry in Negidal motion verbs that convey Path meaning, through their frequency and co-occurrence with Source vs. Goal Grounds. Among verbs lexicalizing Path, some are inherently Goal-oriented (*i*:- ‘enter’, *es*- ‘reach’) while others are Source-oriented (*ju*:- ‘exit’). Therefore, a congruence between the orientation of the verb and the type of Grounds with which it appears is expected.

To conduct this study, I examined a corpus of narratives produced by 9 Negidal speakers (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017), which includes 3746 utterances expressing motion events. The data was coded following the Berkeley coding manual elaborated by Slobin (2005). Results reveal an asymmetry between Source-oriented vs. Goal-oriented verbs in motion descriptions in Negidal. Source-oriented verbs occur more frequently without Grounds, as in (1), while Goal-oriented verbs are used more frequently with an overtly expressed Ground, as in (2). Regarding combinability, Source-oriented verbs can co-occur with Source- and Goal-Grounds, whereas Goal-oriented verbs tend to co-occur with Goal-Grounds only. Finally, when Grounds are overtly expressed, Goal-Grounds are strikingly more frequent (67%) than Source-Grounds (11%).

1)

uže haŋka-tc̣i-l-li-du-j

ju:-m

already.R choke[INTR]-TAM2-INCH-PRS.PTCP-DAT.ESS-PRFL.SG

exit-NP.1SG

‘When I was already starting to suffocate, I came out.’ (Pakndorf & Aralova 2017: DIN_tonuli: 21)
2) **to:-la-n** **es-sa:n=da** **i:-je-n**
**house-LOC-3SG** **reach-SS.ANT=ADD** enter-NFUT-3SG
'It reached her house and entered.' (Pakendorf & Aralova 2017: APK_1chindakan: 131)

In the corpus, the encoding of Goal-Grounds predominates over that of Source-Grounds. Constructions with Source- and Goal-oriented verbs not only show that the expression of Goal is less constrained, but also that Goal is often distributed in different morphosyntactic elements of the utterance, leading to finer semantic granularity in Goal-oriented constructions. The study of Negidal, a language that has not been investigated in this domain, will contribute to a better understanding of the diversity of strategies used to express spatial relations and language-specific characteristics that play a role in spatial asymmetries.

## Acknowledgements

This research was funded, in whole or in part, by l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), project ANR-20-CE27-0015.

## References

Bourdin, Philippe. 1997. On goal-bias across languages: modal, configurational and orientational parameters, proceedings of LP '96: *Typology: prototypes, item orderings and universals*, Prague, Cech Republic, August 20-22-1996, 185-216.

Ikegami, Yoshihiko. 1987. 'Source' vs. 'Goal': A case of linguistic dissymmetry. *In* R. Dirven and G. Radden *Concept of case*, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 122-146.

Kopecka, Anetta & Marine Vuillermet. 2021. Source-Goal (a)symmetries across languages, in *Studies in Language* 45(1), John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2-35.

Pakendorf, Brigitte & Natalia Aralova. 2017. *Documentation of Negidal, a nearly extinct Northern Tungusic language of the Lower Amur*. http://hdl.handle.net/2196/b644db81-725c-4031-935c-f33c763df152. (Last access: 27/05/2024)

Slobin, Dan I. 2005. *Coding of Motion Events in Texts*.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Shopen, T *Language typology and semantic description, Grammatical categories and the lexicon*, vol. 3, Cambridge: CUP, 225-282.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. *Toward a Cognitive Semantics*, MIT Press.