Schedule 72. StuTS

In Basque (isolate language in south-western Europe), spatial information is expressed by two morphologically different categories of adpositions: locative cases and the so called location nouns. Locative cases form a delimited set and are always suffixed to a noun (-ra ‘to’ > kale-ra ‘to the street’; -raino ‘up to’ > kale-raino ‘up to the street’).
The set of location nouns derives from a primary grammaticalization of body parts (e.g. ahur ‘palm’ > aurre ‘front’; atz ‘finger’ > atze ‘back’; zeihar ‘rib’ > zehar ‘side’) (Lakarra 2013) and it has been a more problematic set to define due to its heterogeneity (de Rijk 1990, Etxepare & Oyharçabal 2013). Some location nouns (such as aurre ‘front’) imply a referential point in space and allow combining with any locative case (aurre-an; ‘in front’ aurre-tik ‘from the front’) while others imply a direction in space and can only combine with one locative case to form complex adpositions.

In recent times, the locative cases are been substituted by new complex adpositions in some of the varieties. These complex adpositions are created from the merge of a locative case and a location noun derived from a body part. For example, in western Basque, the terminative case -raino (‘up to’) is been substituted by -rarte, a merge between the allative case -ra (‘to`) and a referential noun arte (in between’). Meanwhile the prolative case -tik (‘through’; ‘across’) is been substituted by -n zehar, a merge between the locative case -n (‘in’) and zehar (‘side’) a location noun derived from a body part. Thus, synchronic changes in locative cases allow tracing back the primary (body parts > location nouns) and secondary grammaticalization (location nouns > locative cases) in Basque.

Info

Day: 2022-11-05
Start time: 11:15
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 3016
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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