| An outstanding puzzle posed by the Directional Locative (DL) Cases in Finnish is that they can occur with verbs that denote neither motion nor change of state (e.g., unohtaa 'forget', loytaa 'find'). If DL Cases have the 'path' meanings commonly attributed to the equivalent class of directional prepositions in English, it would be difficult to explain their regular occurrence with classes of verbs that English DLs do not occur with.; I explain the distributional properties of Finnish DL predicates by arguing that Finnish DLs have certain semantic properties different from the equivalent class of directional prepositions in English. I introduce a diphasic model for the interpretation of DLs, locating the semantics of DLs at the level of ordered structures.; The main results are the following: (i) Both English and Finnish DLs have a more abstract meaning than that normally assumed (in most analyses of English directional prepositions). In particular, I argue against a direct mapping of directional preposition meaning onto paths. (ii) The lexical semantics of similar verb types in both languages are the same. However, Finnish DLs can operate on non-spatial semantic structures, namely, on the aspectual (temporal) structures of the verb, while English DLs generally do not. (iii) The interaction between the semantics of DLs and verbs of motion motivates the idea of lexical aspect shift in the verb. This approach correctly predicts typological differences in the argument structures of languages like French, Mandarin Chinese, Finnish, and English. (iv) The analysis extends to the state cases in Finnish, thus showing that the proposal is not confined to analyzing directional locatives. (v) Path meanings are re-constructed from the spatial or spatio-temporal mappings objects and motion events. This gives a formal account of what, in conceptual semantics, the notion of 'path' refers to. |
