Expressions of directed caused accompanied motion in Komnzo

Abstract

This chapter describes and analyses the expression of directed caused accompanied motion (directed CAM) in Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. The chapter focusses on the interaction between lexical semantics and verb morphology. It shows that the expression of CAM events revolves around a handful of very frequent lexical items (carry, fetch, return verbs), which can be placed in different morphological templates. Morphological fluidity provides a productive mechanism to derive causative alternations of intransitive motion verbs, i.e. an intransitive return verb can be used to express 'return something'. The chapter adopts a corpus linguistic approach to the phenomenon of CAM events by providing a fine-grained frequency analysis of the most important verb lexemes based on the Komnzo text corpus. Additionally, the chapter describes how the system of adverbial demonstratives and case markers contribute to expression of CAM events.