The expression of static location in a typological perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider the crosslinguistic variation of the predicative element of a (henceforth BLC) in order to open up the scope of the discussion of this construction in two directions. One is to situate the contribution of the locative predicate to the BLC construction and to take into account its relation to other elements of the construction; going beyond the usual focus on either prepositions alone or locative verbs alone. The other direction is to look beyond the locative construction itself in order to consider where else the elements of the locative predicate can be found in the grammar of the language, and for what use. Although this paper describes the variety of locative predicates on the basis of examples from Amerindian languages, it aims to argue broadly for the development of descriptive strategies that would invite more comprehensive descriptions of this construction in the widest variety of languages possible. This is done with a double aim in mind: first to facilitate the discussion of such constructions for those faced with the description of still underor undescribed languages, most of which being by and large seriously endangered today, and ultimately to contribute to the on-going discussion of what Slobin has called “thinking for speaking” (1991) by contributing interesting new data from very diverse languages.

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