Motion verbs and deictic distinctions

[The Hanged Man]

While listening "Conlangery Podcast" (episode #14: Verb framing and postural verbs), I've heard something about verbs to come and to go to be "often the same" in other languages. While I know that in some languges motion verbs translated as one of these two can cover situations different from those in english, like:

1) verb of coming doesn't have additional meaning of reaching a destination (to arrive), like in Mandarin, or Paya Kuna:
http://www.sil.org/silepubs/Pubs/928474 ... 20Kuna.pdf (16.4.1.3 Scope of movement, p. 214)
2) verbs to come and to go always refer to deictic centre which is current location of the speaker (again, Paya Kuna)
3) different verbs of motion, covering different combination of particular phases of travel (these were listed in Paya Kuna grammar, linked above), and directions of motion, like in Hocąk language: http://tinyurl.com/8rgfyu8

I wondered: what are languages, that have a single motiont verb for to go and to come, with deictic distinctions encoded solely by adpositions, adverbs, or cases of nouns and pronouns, if there are any? In the episode of the podcast such possibility was mentioned, but no one gave an example of such a language.

And there is another thing I'd like to know: do you know any other system of deictic motion verbs, that works differently from those mentioned here?

[Whimemsz]

Ojibwe is basically an example: izhaa means "to go" (general, unspecified motion toward some goal), while bi-izhaa means "to come", where bi- is a preverb (verbal proclitic treated as a separate phonological word) indicating motion toward the speaker or the deictic center. This is complicated a bit by the fact that Ojibwe has a nearly-infinite number of motion words which refer to very specific kinds of motion, and in context a number of them could be translated as "to go" or "to come"; but izhaa and bi-izhaa are the most general terms.

[Kuturere Reo]

Māori is an example of the use of diectic particles, eg haere mai = come, haere atu = depart.

[Ser]

And there is another thing I'd like to know: do you know any other system of deictic motion verbs, that works differently from those mentioned here?

English "to come" always refers to the destination as the deictic centre, even if it involves movement away from the speaker. Example: a speaker talking in Canada, "He was in Pakistan, then he came to India". Another example: a speaker outside a house, intending to go in, "I"m coming!". (Using venir in Spanish/French would be ungrammatical in both cases.)

[zompist]

English "to come" always refers to the destination as the deictic centre, even if it involves movement away from the speaker. Example: a speaker talking in Canada, "He was in Pakistan, then he came to India". Another example: a speaker outside a house, intending to go in, "I"m coming!". (Using venir in Spanish/French would be ungrammatical in both cases.)

Neither of those sound quite right to me. I'd say the first should be "went" and the second "I'm coming in".

You can certainly adopt someone else's point of view, e.g. in telling a story. But I wouldn't call that a different lexical meaning of 'come'.

As for the original question, one example is Russian, where the primary distinction is between going by foot or vehicle. (A dictionary will give you a verb for 'come', but it's the preposition pri 'near' + 'go', and merely one of a large class of preposition + motion verb compounds; it's more like 'arrive' or 'approach'.

[Travis B.]

English "to come" always refers to the destination as the deictic centre, even if it involves movement away from the speaker. Example: a speaker talking in Canada, "He was in Pakistan, then he came to India". Another example: a speaker outside a house, intending to go in, "I"m coming!". (Using venir in Spanish/French would be ungrammatical in both cases.)

Neither of those sound quite right to me. I'd say the first should be "went" and the second "I'm coming in".

Agreed, except that I would personally replace went to with went over to; but then, my dialect just happens to use over quite gratuitously in that way...

[Salmoneus]

And there is another thing I'd like to know: do you know any other system of deictic motion verbs, that works differently from those mentioned here?

English "to come" always refers to the destination as the deictic centre, even if it involves movement away from the speaker. Example: a speaker talking in Canada, "He was in Pakistan, then he came to India". Another example: a speaker outside a house, intending to go in, "I"m coming!". (Using venir in Spanish/French would be ungrammatical in both cases.)

First example is wrong - if you say "he came to India", you have to be in India, or have been in India when he went there (or to be speaking in the voice of someone else, of course).

The exception, which I've just thought of, is in a very particular circumstance, so particular that I think it's actually a different verb that works differently: "to come to" can mean to move from one thing to another thing. This can involve actual motion ("Next, Alexander came to India"), but you'd only use that with the definite sense of a series of places he's going to, one by one - "Alexander came to India" in this sense would only be found after Alexander had been to lots of other places, and probably implying that he was going to go on to some others afterward as well. This sense I think is a bit old-fashioned, I'd probably just use "arrived in". This can also be used in cases where there is not actual motion at all, particularly in reading or thinking - "He came to the last page", "When you come to the section in spanish, let me know".

There's also no deictic implication with some more abstract objects - "He came to see that it was fruitless", or "He came into a large inheritance", where the verb I think is just emphasising the dramatic motion from one 'place' to another.

But these are more specific cases. With the general, boring old motion verb, "came" implies motion toward the speaker.

Your second example is an exception, but a necessary one if you think about it - in the first person, you can never arrive at yourself. Instead, "come" in the first person means motion toward the interlocutor. Hence "I'm coming!" in reply to a call. Likewise, you say "is it OK if I go (round) to her house?" but "is it OK if I come (round) to your house?" - you CAN say "Can I go to your house?", but it implies the person you're talking to isn't at their house themselves.

[zompist]

Good point about 1s 'come', but 'never' is too strong. It works fine as a habitual: I come here all the time. Or the past tense: I came here for the waters.

[Radius Solis]

The exception, which I've just thought of, is in a very particular circumstance, so particular that I think it's actually a different verb that works differently: "to come to" can mean to move from one thing to another thing. This can involve actual motion ("Next, Alexander came to India"), but you'd only use that with the definite sense of a series of places he's going to, one by one - "Alexander came to India" in this sense would only be found after Alexander had been to lots of other places, and probably implying that he was going to go on to some others afterward as well. This sense I think is a bit old-fashioned, I'd probably just use "arrived in". This can also be used in cases where there is not actual motion at all, particularly in reading or thinking - "He came to the last page", "When you come to the section in spanish, let me know".

My sense of this is not that it is an exception, but rather, it is a narrative device employing the normal properties of "to come" to change or set the deictic center. "Next, Alexander came to India" strongly suggests that we are about to hear more about his time there, or something else about the place - at minimum, it prompts us to put ourselves in the mindframe of being in India to note the arrival of Alexander.

For comparison, consider a party which you heard about but did not attend. If you wish to inform someone else of the makeup of the party, you might say "Isaiah came to the party", but if instead you are trying to convey the location of Isaiah, you'd be more likely to choose "Isaiah went to the party". FWIW, this also highlights a pitfall in certain grammaticality judgements: we sometimes get false negatives by accidentally assuming a default deictic center, even while discussing deixis. Taken by itself, "Isaiah came to the party" sounds ungrammatical if you weren't at the party, but isn't. Same goes for India, etc.

[Astraios]

Lakota minimally encodes the point in the journey (start, middle, end), direction relative to "here" (usually the speaker's physical location), and the traveller's direction relative to their "base" (where they came from, where they live habitually):

iyáya set off; leave; go (i.e. start of journey, away from here, away from base)
ú be on the way here; be coming (i.e. middle of journey, towards here, away from base)
glá be on the way back there (i.e. middle of journey, away from here, towards base)
glí arrive back here (i.e. end of journey, towards here, towards base)

All the motion verbs originate in just four roots: yá, ú, í, hí, which probably originally just meant go, come, arrive there, arrive here, but now have aspectual meanings as well (the first two are progressive and the second two are perfective), but the derivations used to create the rest of the motion verbs (k- for 'returning to base' and compounding perfective+progressive for 'setting off') aren't found anywhere else in the language, so they're thought of as single roots.

[Salmoneus]

The exception, which I've just thought of, is in a very particular circumstance, so particular that I think it's actually a different verb that works differently: "to come to" can mean to move from one thing to another thing. This can involve actual motion ("Next, Alexander came to India"), but you'd only use that with the definite sense of a series of places he's going to, one by one - "Alexander came to India" in this sense would only be found after Alexander had been to lots of other places, and probably implying that he was going to go on to some others afterward as well. This sense I think is a bit old-fashioned, I'd probably just use "arrived in". This can also be used in cases where there is not actual motion at all, particularly in reading or thinking - "He came to the last page", "When you come to the section in spanish, let me know".

My sense of this is not that it is an exception, but rather, it is a narrative device employing the normal properties of "to come" to change or set the deictic center. "Next, Alexander came to India" strongly suggests that we are about to hear more about his time there, or something else about the place - at minimum, it prompts us to put ourselves in the mindframe of being in India to note the arrival of Alexander.

For comparison, consider a party which you heard about but did not attend. If you wish to inform someone else of the makeup of the party, you might say "Isaiah came to the party", but if instead you are trying to convey the location of Isaiah, you'd be more likely to choose "Isaiah went to the party". FWIW, this also highlights a pitfall in certain grammaticality judgements: we sometimes get false negatives by accidentally assuming a default deictic center, even while discussing deixis. Taken by itself, "Isaiah came to the party" sounds ungrammatical if you weren't at the party, but isn't. Same goes for India, etc.

You're probably right in the first case - after all, that use of 'came' is only found in narratives, afaict.

Not sure about the second - for me, "Isaiah came to the party" still isn't right if you weren't at the party yourself. Unless, maybe, there's a series of parties and you were at some of them but not at that one specifically - "the only time Isaiah came to one of their parties, I had to work late and couldn't go!"


Zompist: well spotted.

[hwhatting]

How important is it for "come" to be used that the speaker really is or was at the location / event the subject arrives at? My impression with things like "X came to India" or "Y came to the party" is that the location / event can become the focus of the conversation simply by being talked about. Would something like this be correct to you:
A: "I heard Jim wanted to go to Bill's party."
B: "Well, as far as I know, he didn't come, but I wasn't there."
Basically, B takes over the viewpoint of people who were there.

[Moanaka]

A: "I heard Jim wanted to go to Bill's party."
B: "Well, as far as I know, he didn't come, but I wasn't there."
Basically, B takes over the viewpoint of people who were there.

It definitely sounds better to use 'go' there, to me.

[Salmoneus]

A: "I heard Jim wanted to go to Bill's party."
B: "Well, as far as I know, he didn't come, but I wasn't there."
Basically, B takes over the viewpoint of people who were there.

It definitely sounds better to use 'go' there, to me.

Yes.

I think you probably can say what you said, but you'd be a lot more likely to use 'go'. I think you need more of a connection to the party to use 'come' - like, you're usually there, or you expected to be there, or something like that.

EDIT: oh, and I think that if it's YOUR party, you don't have to be there. You are there in the person of the party, as it were, you don't necessarily need to be physically there.

[hwhatting]

Moanaka, Salmoneus, thanks for your responses. So English come seems to differ from German kommen in this respect - at least, to me the German equivalent seems natural:
A: "Ich habe gehört, dass Jim zu Bills Party gehen wollte."
B: "Soweit ich weiß, ist er nicht dorthin gekommen, aber ich war nicht da."
(Perhaps it's the dorthin that makes the difference?)

[Imralu]

Anecdote from school: I routinely see my Colombian students sitting in reception at the end of the break and I say "It's time for class" and they reply "I'm going, I'm going." I play ignorant and say "Where are you going?"

Generally, I've noticed that English uses come for any motion towards first or second persons and go in any other direction. Some languages tend to have one verb only for motion towards 1st person and the other verb for motion towards 2nd person and elsewhere.

My conlang Ahu doesn't have the come/go distinction. There's ts- "come/go to" for movement towards something when you say the direction (eg. tsan 'to me', tsau 'to you', tsa teli 'to the house'). There's the imperfective version ets-, which is a bit more like "come/go towards". Hin is for general movement, typically only to say that something is moving (it can be used with ts- or ets- to emphasise them). And there's gù- which mean's "leave" or "depart from". It also has the irregular form gué meaning "leave here" (regular would be guá me(lo)) which would be used for the usual meaning of "Ok, I'm going now."

One unusual thing that Ahu often does is skip these completely and use inceptives with locatives. For example:

Na i ex ni dalan.
1s PRED INCEP.IPFV LOC ocean
"I'm going to(wards) the ocean."
Literally "I'm (gradually) beginning to be at the ocean."

Ex ni could be replaced with nexí (infixing the ex), (e)tsa or hin (e)tsa.

[Niedokonany]

Moanaka, Salmoneus, thanks for your responses. So English come seems to differ from German kommen in this respect - at least, to me the German equivalent seems natural:
A: "Ich habe gehört, dass Jim zu Bills Party gehen wollte."
B: "Soweit ich weiß, ist er nicht dorthin gekommen, aber ich war nicht da."
(Perhaps it's the dorthin that makes the difference?)

In Polish you could use nie przyszedł in this situation, but przyjść is more like the English 'to arrive', ie. 'enter the scene a speaker is focusing on' (though it does of course translate English 'come' quite often as a contrast reminiscent of 'come'/'go' is found in Polish only in the imperative: chodź 'come (here)!' or 'come along!', idź 'go (away)!'; chodź is derived from chodzić, which is normally the iterative or indeterminate equivalent of iść 'go (on foot)' but has developed a special meaning in that particular form). < you probably know that but I thought the OP might find it interesting

Perhaps German kommen lies in between, combining the deictic and non-deictic properties?

[Melteor]

"Awhile ago, the Queen came to Maine and had some lobster. It's been pricey ever since.Thankyouse, Britons."
Deictic center: AMERICA

[hwhatting]

Anecdote from school: I routinely see my Colombian students sitting in reception at the end of the break and I say "It's time for class" and they reply "I'm going, I'm going." I play ignorant and say "Where are you going?"

In Polish you could use nie przyszedł in this situation, but przyjść is more like the English 'to arrive', ie. 'enter the scene a speaker is focusing on' (though it does of course translate English 'come' quite often as a contrast reminiscent of 'come'/'go' is found in Polish only in the imperative: chodź 'come (here)!' or 'come along!', idź 'go (away)!'; chodź is derived from chodzić, which is normally the iterative or indeterminate equivalent of iść 'go (on foot)' but has developed a special meaning in that particular form). < you probably know that but I thought the OP might find it interesting

As has already been mentioned, Russian has a series of motion verbs with a prefix pri- + "specific motion" that denote movement towards a focus location, which is genetically related to the Polish series with przy-. As in Polish, there are cases where English would use "come" or German "kommen", and where one might expect Russian to use "prikhodi / pridi", but where in fact a simple "go" is used. "Come here" is idi syuda, while "come tomorrow" or "come to the meeting" would be pridi zavtra / pridi na sobranie. Also, "I'm coming" (answering when you're called) is idu "I go / I'm going", which reminded me of Imralu's anecdote.