Source-Goal (in)difference and the typology of motion events in the clause

Abstract

Starting from the clause, the functional domain of motion events with the three loci Verbal, Ad-nominal, and Adverbal, the paper investigates various grammatical and lexical means of expression for the encoding of the local roles Source and Goal in a sample of 117 languages and in more detail in one language with grammatically indifferent Source-Goal encoding, Mapudungun. It is found that the feature Source-Goal (in)difference forms a global cline with Consistent languages clustering in Eurasia and Indifferent languages being most frequent in the New World. © 2006, Akademie Verlag. All rights reserved.