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The encoding of motion events in Basque: a preliminary work
Andreas BUSI (Università degli studi di Pavia)

The goal of this work is to give an overview of the morphological and lexical resources of Basque involved in the encoding of motion events. In the first part of the talk, the focus will be on the unidimensional spatial case system of Basque and its tripartite distinction between location, destination of movement and source of movement; we will attempt to provide a cognitive explanation for the behaviour of the subsystem of spatial cases, which takes different forms for animate beings and inanimate objects. In the second part, the presentation will concentrate on the rich inventory of postpositions and locational nouns used to specify the spatial configuration. After a brief description of place adverbs in Basque, the focus will go on the verb: conjugation in Basque is mainly analytical, resulting from the combination of non-finite verb forms with auxiliaries; there are a few verbs which can take the synthetic form, with the conjugation marks attached directly to the lexical verb. Basque verbs, including those expressing motion, present a pervasive lability and have both transitive and intransitive uses in their underived form, but there is also a productive causative derivation. Regarding the morphological structure, we can divide motion verbs in four categories: underived motion verbs, causative motion verbs (used to express indirect caused motion), compound verbs (formed by a non-verbal word - noun or adverb - and the verb egin ‘make’) and motion verbs derived from nouns.