The preliminary analysis of spontaneous Motion events in Nepali
Krishna Prasad Parajuli
In this talk, I will present a preliminary analysis of spontaneous motion events in Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language (Masica, 1991) spoken in Nepal by c. 12 million speakers (CBS report 2012). I will first introduce some general characteristics of Nepali, and will present the methodology and the data collected for this study. I will then discuss the different types of constructions used by the speakers to express motion (e.g. simplex vs. compound verbs, conjunctive participles), and show how semantic elements of motion (e.g. Path, Manner, Deixis) are distributed across the sentence in different lexical and grammatical elements. Furthermore, the presentation will address the use and the function of conjunctive participles (Grierson, 1916; Masica, 1991) that can convey the meaning of either Manner or Path, and that can express simultaneous co-events of motion or subsequent motion events.
References:
Government of Nepal, National Planning Commission (Central Bureau of Statistics) (CBS)). 2012. National population and housing census 2011. (National report) vol. 01. Kathmandu: Government of Nepal.
Grierson, G. A. 1916. Linguistic survey of India vol. IX, part IV (first edition). Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas.
Masica, Colin P. 1991. The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics volume II: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press.
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