The article Jacques (2013) has been recently published. While the HimalCo project has already produced several presentations at various conferences, this is the first published article of the project.
Like all the scholarly productions of our project, it is based on corpus data (on the Japhug language) that will eventually all be made available on the Pangloss website. The article has two aims: first, to describe the associated motion construction in Japhug Rgyalrong and second, to use these data to contribute to the discussion on cross-category harmony (the idea that word order and affix order are correlated in some way). Since the second part might only interest theoretical linguists, I will now offer some reflections on the first part.
Languages with associated motion have a set of verbal affixes that describe a motion event occurring before, during or after the action referred to by the verb. In addition, they also have a competing construction with a motion verb and its complement. Since none of the world’s major languages has associated motion, this category has been relatively neglected, though it does not appear to be particularly rare. In the article, I focus on the semantic differences between the two constructions and show that a syntactic test involving negation works only with the motion-verb construction, not with the associated-motion construction.
For further information on Associated Motion as a cross-linguistic category, I recommend the work of Antoine Guillaume (2006, 2009) who has extensively worked on Tacanan languages. He and I are planning to work together on the typology of Associated Motion.
References
Guillaume, Antoine (2006). La catégorie du “mouvement associé” en cavineña: apport à une typologie de l’encodage du mouvement et de la trajectoire. Bulletin de la société linguistique de Paris 101 (2): 415–436.
Guillaume, Antoine (2009). Les suffixes verbaux de mouvement associé en cavineña. Faits de Langues : Les Cahiers 1: 181–204.
Jacques, Guillaume 2013. Harmonization and disharmonization of affix ordering and basic word order. Linguistic Typology, 17 (2):187–215
