Deictic motion verbs and anchoring the direction of motion in Estonian, Finnish and Czech

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contrast Estonian and Finnish deictic motion verbs (minema/mennä, tulema/tulla, viima/viedä, tooma/tuoda) with descriptions of the same motion situations in Czech, which does not have similar pairs of deictic motion verbs. The paper first describes Estonian and Finnish deictic motion verbs according to the literature and provides a short overview of motion verbs in Czech. The analysis is based on examples selected from two literary texts, one Estonian and one Finnish, and their translations. The comparison concentrates on different means of anchoring the direction of motion, that is, which part of the motion scene is selected as the landmark for translational motion. The paper shows that though Czech verb prefixes can in effect anchor the direction of motion to the speaker or to a location known to the speaker and addressee, the function of these prefixes is not directly comparable with the pairs of deictic motion verbs in Finnish and Estonian.

Keywords

• motion verb
• deixis
• translation
• contrastive analysis
• estonian
• finnish
• czech