The interplay of conceptualization and case marking in the directional cases of Udmurt
Authors: Erkkilä Riku 
Published: November 2024

In this paper I discuss the variation among the directional cases in Udmurt (Permic, Uralic). Udmurt has a spatial case system consisting of seven cases in total, of which four are directional cases. Two of the directional cases, elative and egressive, express the source of an action, and two, illative and terminative, the goal of an action. Previous accounts have established that the distinguishing factor between the pairs is the expression of some limit. Egressive and terminative are used to express beginning and end limit, respectively, whereas elative and illative are seen not to express a limit. This kind of distinction in a spatial case system is typologically extremely rare. Especially a case dedicated for starting limit seems not to be attested anywhere else than in the Permic languages, Udmurt, and its closes relative Komi.

The explanation for the variation between the cases given in previous research, namely that egressive and terminative express a limit, whereas elative and illative do not, seems not to be general enough, however. Especially, in the spatial domain there are examples where, e.g., illative is said to express the endpoint of movement, and terminative the end limit of a movement, but the depicted situations seem basically identical. Therefore, I suggest that there is a more general tendency of using the limit cases to construe an event as bounded from the beginning or the end, respectively, whereas the non-limit cases is used when the construal does not include a boundary of the event, or the boundary is backgrounded.

To explore this possibility, I conduct a qualitative analysis of the senses of each case, as well as a quantitative analysis exploring the effects of different aspects of verbal semantics on the choice between the limit and non-limit cases in the spatial domain. The dataset is 500 manually annotated and analyzed examples of Udmurt literary language, mostly newspaper texts. The process is done manually, as the automatic annotation of the original corpus yields too many false positives when queried for instances of cases. The qualitative analysis is conducted by the Principled Polysemy approach, which yields reliable results on the semantic structure of spatial elements in general. The quantitative analysis is done by implementing a random forest analysis on the dataset. Random forest is chosen for the method because the dataset is somewhat small, and the data points cannot be considered independent.

The qualitative analysis reveals that the limit cases are indeed used to express senses like the beginning or end of a timespan or a change in amount, which seem to incorporate a boundary of the event. In contrast, the non-limit cases are used to express senses where the boundary is implied but backgrounded. The quantitative analysis reveals that the semantics of the verb indeed do play a role in the choice between the limit and non-limit cases in the spatial domain. However, due to the nature of the data and the chosen methodology it is not possible to say how exactly the semantics of the verb affect the choice between cases. Nonetheless, the results firmly point to the direction that the difference between the limit and non-limit cases should be analyzed as a difference in the construal of the events, which then have special cases depending on the exact situation expressed.