Volume 48, Issue 5

The encoding of direction (place, goal, source, route) in systems of adpositions and local cases is not uniformly distributed over different locations (at, in, under), but can be shown to follow a hierarchical pattern. This pattern is compared with similar hierarchies proposed in the literature about the acquisition and typology of spatial language. Differences in semantic complexity and pragmatic salience between locations might explain why such a hierarchy exists.

One of the features that distinguishes Daghestanian languages of the Caucasus from many other languages is the richness of the nominal paradigm, which arises due to large locative subsystems, counting up to eighty forms. This paper presents a description of major distinctions made by Daghestanian in the topological domain. The paper reveals three basic semantic oppositions underlying systems of nominal locative markers and describes a number of minor points of variation. In the domain of location in Ground this is the distinction between location in container and location in substance. In the domain of location on Ground, the primary division in most languages of the family is between attachment and nonattachment configurations. In the domain of location near Ground, several languages use the formal distinction between localization marker and postposition to reflect the semantic contrast between location in a space associated with a given Ground and location near Ground. The detailed comparison shows that the same distinction can function quite differently even in related languages. The paper also makes a number of crosslinguistic observations related to patterns found in Daghestanian.

In this article, I argue for a decomposition of the Path head in the syntactic structure for directional expressions. Based on crosslinguistic data showing that different types of paths are of different complexity and, crucially, are subject to a morphological containment relationship, I propose a more detailed structure for directionals. I adopt the orthodox view that Goal paths are built on top of a locative Place projection. However, I suggest that Source paths are built on top of Goal paths. This is evidenced by the morphological makeup of Source-denoting elements in a variety of languages, where the Source marker morphologically contains the Goal marker. Further, I explore the lexicalization of the decomposed Path structure I defend and test the predictions against the empirical domain of syncretisms between the spatial roles Source, Goal, and Location. I show that the decomposed Path structure and the lexicalization theory I adopt capture syncretism patterns that are widely attested among languages and ban those syncretism patterns that are unattested.

The Tsezic languages form a sub-branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family. They have up to eight location markers that can be combined with up to six orientation markers in order to form complex spatial categories. Outside the spatial domain these markers indicate temporal and metaphorical location and orientation. Their grammatical uses include among others the marking of verbal arguments, of nonfinite verb forms in adverbial clauses and the expression of possession or purpose. This paper is meant to provide a comprehensive description of the nonlocal functions in relation to the spatial functions and to reveal the structure in the distribution of nonlocal functions of the cases. The nonlocal uses are not equally distributed among the local cases. Some location and orientation markers have many nonlocal functions while others have almost only local uses.

Locative expressions encode the spatial relationship between two (or more) entities. In this paper, we focus on locative expressions in signed language, which use the visual-spatial modality for linguistic expression, specifically in Turkish Sign Language ( Türk İşaret Dili , henceforth TİD ). We show that TİD uses various strategies in discourse to encode the relation between a Ground entity (i.e., a bigger and/or backgrounded entity) and a Figure entity (i.e., a smaller entity, which is in the focus of attention). Some of these strategies exploit affordances of the visual modality for analogue representation and support evidence for modality-specific effects on locative expressions in sign languages. However, other modality-specific strategies, e.g., the simultaneous expression of Figure and Ground, which have been reported for many other sign languages, occurs only sparsely in TİD. Furthermore, TİD uses categorical as well as analogical structures in locative expressions. On the basis of these findings, we discuss differences and similarities between signed and spoken languages to broaden our understanding of the range of structures used in natural language (i.e., in both the visual-spatial or oral-aural modalities) to encode locative relations. A general linguistic theory of spatial relations, and specifically of locative expressions, must take all structures that might arise in both modalities into account before it can generalize over the human language faculty.