Antoine Guillaume
Address: Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (DDL)
UMR 5596 (CNRS & Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Institut des Sciences de l'Homme
14 avenue Berthelot
69363 LYON Cedex 07
FRANCE
UMR 5596 (CNRS & Université Lumière Lyon 2)
Institut des Sciences de l'Homme
14 avenue Berthelot
69363 LYON Cedex 07
FRANCE
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The three constructions share the presence of a deictic motion element (the inflected independent verbs iri ‘go’ or veniri ‘come’ in C1 and C2, the prefix va- ‘GO’ in C3) which combines with a non-motion verb (inflected in C2 and C3, non-inflected in C1) and encodes a spatial displacement of the subject argument temporally preceding the non-motion event.
From both genetic and areal perspectives, C2 and C3 are particularly interesting, as they instantiate patterns fairly rare within Romance languages and, more generally, European languages, such as verb serialization in C2 (as argued by Cruschina 2013 and Accattoli & Todaro 2017) and associated motion in C3 (as will be proposed in this paper).
A first goal of the paper is to contribute to a better understanding of these constructions in Sicilian with new data on the variety of Monreale. We will explore their respective formal and semantic properties, the competition between them in discourse, and the similarities and differences between these constructions in the Monreale variety and in other Sicilian varieties including the Western varieties spoken in Trapani (cf. Accattoli & Todaro 2017) and Delia (cf. Di Caro 2015). In this respect, an interesting result of our study is that, in the variety of Monreale, C3 seems to be used much more frequently than in, at least, the varieties of Trapani and Delia.
A second goal is to put these constructions in a typological perspective. Here, an important contribution of the paper is the claim that the ‘GO’ prefix in C3 represents a well-grammaticalized marker of associated motion, a verbal grammatical category whose function is to associate, in different ways, different kinds of translational motion to a (generally non-motion) verb event (cf. Guillaume 2016; Guillaume & Koch 2021). In doing so, this study explicitly identifies for the first time the instantiation of associated motion in a language from Europe, a region where this grammatical category has to this date been said to be conspicuously lacking (cf. Guillaume & Koch 2021; Ross 2021).