Deixis in Slavic ‚COME‘ in a European parallel corpus

In this paper, I give a broad outline of Slavic motion verbs comparable to Engl. come, French venire ‚come‘, Finnish tulla ‚come‘ etc (henceforth: ventive verbs). I focus on the question: to what extent are these verbs deictic in their meaning, how do they differ and to what extent does their use reflect outcomes of language contact?

I take ventive verbs to have two defining properties (see e.g. Lewandowski 2014, Wälchli & Cysouw 2012: 690ff., Matsumoto et al. 2017): first, they are goal-oriented in that they emphasize the striving to, or reaching of, an endpoint; second, they are deictic in that this endpoint is towards the speaker, hearer or other, transposed deictic center.

Languages are very different in respect to the importance of the deictic component. In a questionnaire-based study into deictic motion verbs, Ricca (1993) distinguishes non-deictic, predominantly deictic, and strongly deictic languages. For Slavic, he shows that Ukrainian, Russian, Czech and Polish (with verbs such as pryjty/prychodyty, przyść/przychodzić) are non-deictic, while Slovene and BCS (priti/prihajati, doći/dolaziti) are predominantly deictic. However, while it is quite clear that Bulgarian (Speed 2015; see also Nedelcheva & Šarić 2021; Filipović 2007 for BCS) is a strongly deictic language, a complete overview with more details concerning the nature of these differences in actual texts is still missing.

In this talk, I use a parallel corpus of narrative texts (parasolcorpus.org) to investigate the meaning potential and division of labour of ventive and other verbs in Slavic languages against the backdrop of other European languages. This approach enables me to see more clearly similarities as well as differences between the Slavic languages and assess these within their areal context.

For example, translations into all Slavic languages typically use ventive verbs (prefixed with cognates of Common Slavic *pri- or *do-) in cases of completed movement towards the speaker (‚he came to me‘), as do the other European languages. This serves as a defining context for these ventive verbs; such contexts are the reason they are readily identified as equivalents of ‚come‘. However, in cases where there is completed movement not towards the speaker/hearer, but into a scene in which the narrative enfolds, ventive verbs are used only by the non-deictic or predominantly deictic languages, while the strongly deictic languages use verbs with the meaning of ‚arrive‘. Again, this is mirrored by the use of such verbs in translations into other European languages with strictly deictic ventive verbs, such as Spanish.

The parallel corpus approach also yields more unexpected results. In examples where there is movement out of a container towards the speaker (as in, e.g., the children came running out towards us) only Slovene uses a ventive verb, while all other Slavic standard languages use motion verbs with the prefix iz- or vy- ‚out‘ – as do most non-Slavic translations, include into strongly deictic languages. In fact, Slovene patterns with Germanic here in foregrounding the deictic motion, pointing to the effects of language contact with German.

In my talk I will use such examples as well as more quantitative approaches to draw an informative and detailed picture of the use and semantics of ventive verbs in Slavic within a European context.