Goal and source in South American languages

Abstract: This study primarily investigates the expression of two local roles, goal and source, in South American languages. Local roles describe the direction of movement or locatedness in relation to a physical object, a ground, in a motion event. While goal expresses motion to or towards and source expresses motion from a ground, these are not always distinguished from one another but sometimes encoded indifferently. A previous cross-linguistic study by Wälchli and Zúñiga (2006) shows that the encoding of goal and source tends to be distinct in Eurasia, North Africa, and Australia, and more diverse in the Americas and New Guinea. However, the sample used in their study is not representative in the Americas. The principal aim of the present study is to determine whether the encoding of goal and source is distinct or indifferent in a representative sample of South American languages, using both reference grammars and parallel texts consisting of Bible translations. The local role path, expressing motion through a ground, is also studied to the extent that this is possible given the data. The findings show that distinct encoding of goal and source is most common in the sample. Indifferent languages are still attested for, yet to a smaller extent than in Wälchli and Zúñiga's study (2006).