Chapter 79: Going to named places
1. Introduction⇫¶
This is the first of several chapters investigating intransitive and transitive motion constructions. In the present chapter, we study the different means to express the action of going to named places, as in English She went to Leipzig. Here the named place, Leipzig (the goal), is preceded by the preposition to which expresses a particular orientation. We call this orientation 'motion-to' in the relevant APiCS chapters, as opposed to 'motion-from' and 'at-rest' orientations (following Comrie & Smith 1977). As we will see, different languages use different means to express orientation in directed motion events.
We restrict ourselves to goals which are named places, e.g. names of villages, cities, or countries (for the highly frequent goal/source 'market', see Chapter 81 on motion-to and motion-from) because in many languages different kinds of goals are expressed in different ways.
2. The values⇫¶
In this feature we distinguish seven values:
| excl | shrd | all | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | No adpositional/case marking | 22 | 31 | 53 |
 | Preposition | 12 | 34 | 46 |
 | Postpostion | 2 | 2 | 4 |
 | Circumposition | 0 | 1 | 1 |
 | Serial verb | 0 | 8 | 8 |
 | Serial verb plus preposition | 1 | 10 | 11 |
 | Case | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Representation: | 76 | |||
In 53 APiCS languages, there is no adpositional or case marking of the named place (value 1).
22 languages show this pattern as their only option. Here we find nearly all French-based creoles (except for Louisiana Creole and Guyanais), three Caribbean English-based creoles, the Portuguese-based creoles of the Gulf of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau Kriyol, most pidgins (Eskimo Pidgin, Chinuk Wawa, Chinese English Pidgin, and Pidgin Hindustani), and some mixed languages (Michif and Mixed Ma'a/Mbugu.
The second most frequent motion-to construction (46 APiCS languages) uses a preposition to mark the named place (value 2).
For 12 languages this is the only marking type, i.e. some English-based creoles of the Caribbean and the Pacific, Negerhollands and Palenquero, the Spanish-based Chabacano varieties of the Philippines, and two African languages (Kinubi and Kikongo-Kituba).
The use of a preposition does not necessarily imply that this preposition is a specific motion-to preposition. As will be shown in Chapter 81, some of the preposition-marking languages with value 2 use the very same preposition also to mark motion-from. Thus, the preposition in such languages does not express the motion-to orientation towards the named place, but only some spatial feature of the goal, here the named place. Early Sranan is one such language: it has the preposition na in motion-to situations, but van den Berg & Bruyn (2013) stress that this preposition is neutral as to the motion-to/motion-from differentiation (for further discussion see Chapter 81):
This situation also holds for Saramaccan, Pichi, Krio, Lingala, Kikongo-Kituba, Ternate Chabacano, Tok Pisin, Bislama and Pidgin Hawaiian.
Very few APiCS languages have a postposition (value 3) to mark motion to a named place. Sri Lankan Malay and Yimas-Arafundi Pidgin (see ex. 9) only show this value, whereas Afrikaans and Sri Lanka Portuguese share this strategy with others.
Here again, the postposition kandək does not exclusively mark motion-to, but is also used in motion-from contexts (see Chapters 80 and 81).
Afrikaans is the only language in which motion to a named place can be expressed by a circumposition (value 4). The postpositional part toe 'to' is optional:
The next two values involve serial verb constructions with a serial verb 'reach, go (down)' (value 5; eight languages, see ex. 11) and with a serial verb plus a preposition (value 6; eleven languages, see ex. 12). Except for Papiá Kristang and Tok Pisin, all serializing languages are spoken in narrowly confined areas, namely in the Guianas (with Jamaican as an outlier) and in West Africa.
Nengee is the only APiCS language that marks motion-to exclusively by a serial verb construction (with an additional preposition).
In Cameroon Pidgin English (Schröder 2013), the serial verb construction (with or without a preposition) rich (fo) (see ex. 13), signals unintentional reaching of a goal, whereas this connotation is not implied in the other strategy available in this language, prepositional marking (value 2):
There are only two languages in APiCS where motion-to is marked by a case suffix (value 7), the two mixed languages Gurindji Kriol and Media Lengua. In Media Lengua, the allative suffix -mu marks motion to a named place, here Otavalo:
3. Distribution⇫¶
In 53 APiCS languages, named place goals may lack any adpositional or case marking (value 1). For the languages with a European base (41 languages), these results are somewhat puzzling, especially for those languages which only have the zero pattern. Apparently the model of the base languages has not been taken over: In European languages, orientation towards a goal is always marked by a preposition, e.g. English I go to Paris, French Je vais à Paris ‘I go to Paris’, Spanish/Portuguese Voy/Vou à/para Paris (expressions like I go home being quite exceptional). One could argue that in APiCS languages with value 1, the lack of the preposition is due to the simplification forces of the pidginization/ creolization process. In fact, many pidgins in APiCS show value 1. But this leaves us with the question why for instance Saramaccan, known as a radical creole, does show overt prepositional marking (value 2), a pattern which is also very wide-spread in APiCS (46 languages).
After examining the coding of coming-from constructions in the next chapter, we will be in the position to evaluate the data in terms of different hypotheses in Chapter 81 on motion-to and motion-from. We will see that
an interpretation in terms of retention of substrate patterns is very plausible.