Deictic motion
We have seen that although the body is a basic and universal aspect of our experience, there are remarkably few cross-linguistic generalizations that hold about the semantics of body-part terms. The basic actions expressed in English as ‘coming’ and ‘going’ present a similar situation, at least on the evidence of a smaller-scale study undertaken by Wilkins and Hill (1995). ‘Come’ and ‘go’ are deictic motion verbs, expressing movement to and away from an anchoring point (the deictic centre). These meanings have often been assumed to be universally lexicalized.
QUESTION Does go show any non-deictic motion senses in English?
Wilkins and Hill examined the verbs translating come and go in Arrernte (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) and Longgu (Austronesian, Solomon Islands). They found that the basic types of scene which the verbs express in the two languages do not coincide. The languages differ in both the scope of application of the terms – how broad a range of situations the come and go verbs can refer to – and in what counts as the most typical example of each category. In our discussion we will only consider the expressions translating ‘come’, the Longgu verb phrase la mai and the Arrernte verb root petye-. Wilkins and Hill used diagrams like those in Figure 11.2 to capture the essential parts of these verbs’ meaning.
‘O’ represents the deictic centre, understood as ‘the place where both speaker and hearer are located, and where the speaker is reporting the whole motion event to the addressee’ (Wilkins and Hill 1995: 217). The arrows are the path along which the motion proceeds, and the dots represent the place from which it originates: notice that this is missing in scene 3, which corresponds to a situation in which the origin of the motion is not specifically represented (when someone approaches from over the horizon, for example).
The differences between la mai and petye- can be seen through these examples. The four scenes in the diagram can all be described in Arrernte with the verb petye-. This is appropriate whether or not the thing in movement reaches the deictic centre: all that is required is that the thing in motion move towards the deictic Centre. Indeed, some Arrernte speakers feel that the verb is most appropriate precisely in scenes 1 and 2, when the deictic centre is not reached. By contrast, Longgu la mai can only be used when the deictic centre is actually reached, which rules out scenes 1 and 2, the very ones sometimes judged as central by Arrernte speakers.
This simple case reveals how much semantic detail is obscured by the identical English translations of the two verbs. Translation into the same English word is no guarantee of semantic identity. Only a more fi ne grained metalanguage, in this case using diagrams, can show the cross linguistic differences in meaning.
