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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod



Summary Details


Query:   Goal-Location-Source Ambiguities
Author:  Sander Lestrade
Submitter Email:  click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):   Morphology
Typology

Summary:   I was searching for languages that do not make a distinction between source
and location in their spatial case system, but do have a separate case
marker for goal meaning.

Some of you referred to the very interesting work of Nikitina, which I
forgot to mention in my query (and know of course ;) ).

Latin seems to be a good example: ablative expressing both source and
location: ''Romae'' (abl) meaning ���from/in Rome���; Romam (acc) meaning ���to
Rome���.

Some Saami languages (at least Inari) should have a locative case to
express both source and location, and an illative for goal .

The directionality distinction in Cantonese is not made with case but with
the verb, and might have the ambiguity I���m after:

sinsang hai bakging ''The teachers are in Beijing''
sinsang hai bakging lai ''The teachers from Beijing come''
vs.
sinsang lai bakging ''The teachers come [to] Beijing''

These examples still need to be checked with native speakers, however, and
I���m not sure about the role of ���lai��� in the second example.

Then, there are many Indo-European languages languages in which
prepositions combine with different cases to distinguish between goal and
location. This could mean that source meaning patterns with the ���location
case���, but it could also be that it has a specific adposition (as in
English ���from��� versus ���on(to)���).

Thanks for all your help! Sander Lestrade

LL Issue: 19.3044
Date Posted: 08-Oct-2008
Original Query: Read original query


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