LEXICAL MEANING AND CONTEXTUAL INFERENCE: GOAL/SOURCE AMBIGUITY IN DESCRIPTIONS OF
MOTION
Tatiana Nikitina
Stanford University
Saturday, January 20, 4:30 PM MJH Rm 126
In the typology of motion descriptions, the two locative roles that
languages most frequently differentiate between are the roles of goal
and source. When the contrast between goals and sources is not encoded
by distinct adpositional marking, the two roles are often distinguished
due to specialization of motion verbs. I explore the use of this
strategy in Wan (Mande) and other languages and argue that the grammar
of motion verbs is sensitive to the amount of information about the
motion event that is encoded by that verb. This correlation reflects a
general mechanism of compositional expression of meaning, which relies
in part on unambiguous encoding (e.g., on fixing the role of the
argument in the verb's argument structure) and in part on contextual
inference (typically, precisely with verbs that facilitate such inference).
