'Going home' in typological perspective
Creators: name: Nintemann, Julia
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: “There is no place like home” – This sentiment is also reflected in many languages, as constructions involving the concept of ‘home’ often adhere to their own rules. The talk focuses on constructions where ‘home’ is the goal of a movement in comparison to other common nouns and toponyms in the same position. Linguistic research has already acknowledged that toponyms often follow rules distinct from those governing common nouns, especially in constructions with spatial meaning (cf., e.g., Stolz et al. 2014; Stolz & Nintemann 2024). Additionally, Haspelmath (2019: 322) observes that “languages sometimes give special treatment to a diverse set of nouns that denote concepts which are commonly used as spatial landmarks, such as ‘(one’s) house’ […]”. 

In Neverver [Austronesian], for example, common nouns must be marked with the general locative preposition lon when acting as the Ground (cf. Talmy 1978) in a Goal construction (1a), whereas toponyms are generally zero-marked (1b). Furthermore, there is a very restricted set of only three nouns that behave like toponyms in that they are zero-marked, one of them being ‘(one’s) home’ (1c).

(1)         Neverver [Austronesian]

a.            Ground = common noun (Barbour 2012: 130)

               Lesien                   at-uv                     lon         nokhos.

               Lesien                   3real:pl-go         loc         garden

               ‘Lesien and them went to the garden.’

b.            Ground = toponym (Barbour 2012: 110)

               Ale         nimkhut               turien                   at-uv                     Ø            Vorkha.

               then       man                      some                    3real:pl-go         Ø            Vorkha.

               ‘Then, some men went to Vorkha.’

c.            Ground = ‘home’ (Barbour 2012: 341)

               Ale,        i-dum                    i-vlem                                  Ø            aiyem.

               then       3real:sg-run       3real:sg-come   Ø            home

               ‘And then she ran back home.’

Matching Haspelmath’s (2019) term ‘topo-nouns’, the Neverver noun aiyem ‘home’ receives special treatment in spatial constructions by following the rules for toponyms rather than those for common nouns. However, cross-linguistically, this special treatment of ‘home’ does not automatically imply the same treatment as that given to toponyms. Sometimes, strategies deviating from both common nouns and toponyms are employed when ‘home’ is the goal of a movement, as, e.g., in German Ich gehe heim or Swedish Jag går hem, both meaning ‘I go home’. In both languages, prepositions are required with toponyms and common nouns in Goal constructions, whereas ‘home’ is expressed adverbially with an expression that is derived from a noun (German HeimN, Swedish hemN). The existence of constructions like French chez moi ‘at/to my place/home’ in many languages certainly supports the idea that the concept of ‘home’ receives special treatment. However, these constructions will not be included at this point.

In this talk, I will explore how ‘home’ in Goal constructions is expressed cross-linguistically. It will be examined if ‘home’ in these constructions behaves like common nouns, toponyms, or neither. I will demonstrate that the concept of ‘(going) home’ indeed receives special treatment in languages all over the world. For this purpose, I will examine a sample of 100 languages from different areas and of different affiliations from a functional-typological perspective. The data will primarily be taken from descriptive grammars, complemented by primary sources and input from language experts.

 

Abbreviations

loc = general locative preposition, pl = plural, real = realis mood, sg = singular

 

References

Barbour, Julie. 2012. A grammar of Neverver (Mouton Grammar Library 60). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2019. Differential place marking and differential object marking. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 72(3). 313–334.

Stolz, Thomas & Julia Nintemann. 2024. Special Onymic Grammar in typological perspective: Cross-linguistic data, recurrent patterns, functional explanations (Studia Typologica 34). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Stolz, Thomas, Christel Stolz & Sander Lestrade. 2014. The Crosslinguistics of Zero-Marking of Spatial Relations (Studia Typologica 15). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Talmy, Leonard. 1978. Figure and ground in complex sentences. In Joseph Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson & Edith A. Moravcsik (eds.), Universals of human language: Volume 4: Syntax, 625–649. Palo Alto/Ca.: Stanford University Press.