Complex Motion Predicates in Hiaki

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation into compound verbal structures in Hiaki in which a verb of motion is modified by an adjoined lexical verb or verb phrase. It provides the first in-depth documentation and analysis of this structure in Hiaki, an endangered language indigenous to North America, and it explores the extent to which complex predicates of motion may be said to form a discrete class crosslinguistically, either in structural or semantic terms, by comparing Hiaki with genetically and typologically distinct languages such as Korean and Warlpiri. The study asks the following questions: 1) What is the underlying structure of a Hiaki compound verb? In particular, what is the structure when the head verb is intransitive and thus cannot take the second verb or verb phrase as its complement? 2) To what extent can complex motion predicates in different languages be said to map to identical underlying syntactic structures? That is, if we compare these constructions in Hiaki with those in languages with different surface morphosyntactic realizations, how do the allowable surface forms constrain the possible underlying structures? 3) Is there evidence to suggest a cline or typology of complex motion predicate constructions? The overall goals of the dissertation project are the detailed documentation, description and theoretical analysis of complex motion constructions in Hiaki, the crosslinguistic comparison of these constructions, and the expansion of an existing database of transcribed and interlinearized Hiaki texts.