SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

On deictic directionals in Berber

In terms of a Talmyan typology, Taqbaylit Berber (Afroasiatic) follows a canonical verbframed pattern. Deictic directionality, however, is expressed via two clitics: =d the proximal 'toward the speaker', and =nn the distal 'away from the speaker'. These directionals also occur with verbs whose descriptions of events do not at first sight involve motion. In these contexts, they contribute a range of meanings which seem to involve neither deixis nor path (Mettouchi, 1998; Bentolila, 1969 & Fleisch, 2007 for Tamazight and Tashelhit respectively). In the talk I will suggest that, contrary to what is claimed by the sources above, all the meanings of the clitics are derived from their basic deictic and path lexical semantics; each one triggered by the specific internal semantics of the modified verb in addition to pragmatic and cultural parameters. Focussing on =d and its distribution in Taqbaylit, with mention of examples available in the literature, I will show that:
(i) the uses of the proximal clitic in which the reference anchor is not a speech-act participant almost exclusively involve either anaphoricity or logophoricity, two notions which typologically are closely related to deixis.
(ii) the kind of path information the clitic contributes depends on whether a path is encoded by the verb or recoverable from the context. If such a path is available, =d will modify it. If no such path is available, =d contributes its own return path shape of the type 'V and come back'.
With this background, it will finally be proposed that Taqbaylit and probably most Berber languages (cf. El Mountassir, 2000) have high deictic 'salience' (borrowing Slobin's terminology, 2006). This means that most events involving the translocation of a figure along a path (not necessarily a spatial one) are evaluated deictically. The analysis of these clitics as encoding the deictic component of Path (Talmy, 2000), if correct, meets with recent research showing that the same variations in the lexicalization patterns of motion found across languages also occur within languages (Levin et al.,2009).