Source & Goal Asymmetries in Dutch: Elicitation vs corpus data

We investigate Goal bias (Ikegami 1987) in Dutch, a satellite-framed language (Talmy 1985, 2000)
which as such mainly relies on satellites (Talmy 2000: 222, e.g. in “in” in example (1) below), in order
to encode Source and Goal. In this presentation, we evaluate the relevance of elicited data compared
to newly obtained corpus data, in order to explore the extent and expression of the expected Goal bias.
We focus on differences in frequency, morphological complexity and semantic granularity. Our data
thus consist on the one hand of descriptions of self-agentive motion, collected with a set of visual
stimuli (Ishibashi et al. 2006), on the other hand of a corpus of occurrences downloaded from the CHN
database (Corpus of Contemporary Dutch) focused on the use of a series of particle constructions, e.g.
motion verb + postposition-particles op, af, in, uit and weg, as in (1).
(1) Ik sjokte de trap op.
I trudge.PST.1SG the stairs up
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‘I trudged up the stairs’
Our analysis reveals that the main differences lie in the expression of Goal in Source-oriented scenes
(43%) and non-expression of Source in Goal-oriented scenes (7%), with the former scenes frequently
yielding descriptions including both Source and Goal expression, as in (2).
(2) Een vrouw loopt een grot uit het bos in.
a woman walk.PRS.3SG a cave out the wood in
‘a woman walks out of a cave into the woods’
This comes with another bias, the (unexpected) overexpression of the ventive komen ‘to come’, as
in (3), and underexpression of the itive gaan ‘to go’.
(3) Een jongen komt weer uit de zee gerend.
a boy come.PRS.3SG again out the sea run.PSTPART
‘a boy comes running out of the sea’
In order to determine whether the overexpression of komen and the underexpression of gaan are
linked, we explore the hypothesis that the cognitive load of Source expression hinders the conflation
of manner and path in the verb stem, favoring instead the division of information across main verb
(come indicating path) and infinitive (run indicating manner).
The combination of komen with a manner verb (appearing as an infinitive or a past participle) and a
directional phrase (as a satellite) is known to designate an unfolding deictic motion event, and the
variant with the past participle, as in (3), “highlights the end of a process” (Beliën 2016: 30, italics in
the original). In our data, komen always combines with the preposition (van)uit ‘out (of)’, and thus the
motion events only involve a short path, where the agent completes the path of motion from the inside
to the outside. In this type of motion event, the past participle variant is typically found to be much
more frequent than the infinitive variant (Beliën 2016: 29). In our data, however, the situation is more
balanced.
This ventive-itive asymmetry presents an interesting overlap with the source-goal asymmetry: all
occurrences of komen are found in source-oriented scenes, i.e. scenes in which someone can be seen
exiting or leaving from a given place, and is not strictly dependent on the observer's perspective. This
is in line with the findings of Matsumoto et al. (2017), pointing to the importance of the functional
component.
The corpus data explored partially confirm our initial findings on the basis of the elicited data.
References
Beliën, Maaike (2016), Exploring semantic differences in syntactic variation: Dutch komen ‘come’ with a
past participle or an infinitive, in A. Bannink, and W. Honselaar (eds), (2016), From Variation to
Iconicity: Festschrift for Olga Fischer on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, Amsterdam: Pegasus, 17–
32.
Ikegami, Yoshihiko (1987), ‘Source’ vs. ‘goal’: A case of linguistic dissymmetry, in R. Dirven, and G.
Radden (eds), (1987), Concepts of case, Tübingen: Narr, 122‑146.
Ishibashi, Miyuki, Anetta Kopecka, and Marine Vuillermet (2006), Trajectoire : Matériel visuel pour
élicitation des données linguistiques, Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (CNRS / Université Lyon 2)
– Fédération de Recherche en Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques: CNRS, France.
Matsumoto, Yo, Kimi Akita, and Kiyoko Takahashi (2017), The functional nature of deictic verbs and the
coding patterns of Deixis: An experimental study in English, Japanese, and Thai, in I. Ibarretxe-
Antuñano (ed), (2017), Motion and space across languages, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
95–122.
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Talmy, Leonard (1985), Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms, in T. Shopen (ed),
(1985), Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 225-282.
Talmy, Leonard (2000), Towards a Cognitive Semantics II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring,
Cambridge: MIT Press.