Deissi spaziale e verbi di movimento in vedico

This study is part of a broader research project on temporal and spatial deixis in the Proto-Indo-European language. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to investigate the basic motion verbs go and come in Vedic. The deictic component of PATH has often been considered as inherent to the lexical semantics of these verbs cross-linguistically. However, I will show that Vedic i “go”, gā “go; come; step” and gam “go; come” express a deictically-neutral meaning of ‘moving along a path’, which is not characterized with regard to both MANNER and PATH. Data suggest that these verbs can take on a deictic interpretation by cooccurring with specific particles, adverbs, demonstratives, and personal pronouns. Syntactic and discourse analysis of the Rigveda shows that motion verbs occurring in the same syntactic context are selected depending on their inherent lexical aspect (Aktionsart). Telic verbs gā and gam turn out to be intrinsically compatible with the entailment of arrival of the FIGURE to the GROUND, whereas the atelic verb i is used when the prominent information is PATH rather than GOAL of movement.