Moving Right Along: Expressions of Motion and Location and the Argument Structure of Adpositions

This is a five-year investigation into prepositions (like to), postpositions (like Japanese made ‘up to’), particles (like away), and the way that such notions are expressed across languages. It is well-known that languages vary dramatically in the number of adpositional elements they have; even a language as closely related to English as French seems to have far fewer prepositions. Some languages are said not to have any at all. But all languages can express the thoughts that English expresses in sentenc es with prepositions. To circumscribe the problem, I focus on expressions of motion (as in Mary jumped into the boat) and location (cf. Mary jumped around in the boat). These are known to show rich cross-linguistic variation (even just in Germanic, for th is one example type, we see German and Icelandic with a dative-accusative alternation, Swedish and Norwegian with an intonational contrast, Dutch and Afrikaans with a word-order difference, English with the difference between in and into, not to mention t he Scandinavian alternation inn – inne). However, I intend to move far beyond Germanic in this investigation and study a large sample of languages. The primary goal of the project is to achieve a solid characterization of some of the limits on this type of construction, i.e. so-called linguistic universals. If it turns out that a category “P” (preposition, or adposition) can be maintained, then a second major goal is to achieve a solid characterization of the cross-linguistic properties of that category. Secondary goals include testing a wide variety of hypotheses that have been made in the linguistic literature about prepositions and related constructions. Finally, in additional to the academic material that will be produced, I intend to make a short educational film on the basis of this work, aimed at non-specialists, to popularize the importance of documenting the properties of the world’s many and varied languages before most of them disappear.