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Article published In: Studies in Language
Vol. 49:1 (2025) ► pp.93–118

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The ventive and the deictic shift

The case of Old Assyrian

ORCiD logo with link | National Research University Higher School of Economics, HSE | Russian Academy of Sciences
 | National Research University Higher School of Economics, HSE
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.23050.kov
Abstract
The Old Assyrian language is a branch of East Semitic. East Semitic has been extinct since around 400 BCE. The Old Assyrian texts used in this study were produced by Assyrian merchants between 1890 and 1860 BCE in Northern Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia. Old Assyrian, as well as most other East Semitic varieties, had a ventive (or cislocative) marker hosted on motion verbs. This marker obligatorily encoded motion either toward the speaker or the interlocutor (the addressee of a written message). By way of a deictic shift, the ventive sometimes also came to point to a future location of the speaker and even to the whereabouts of non-speech act participants. The ventive marker had three allomorphs which are also allomorphs of the 1st person singular indirect object pronoun ‘to/for me’. The cislocative and personal pronoun meanings of the marker evolved in the course of a complex interaction which we trace in the etymological part of the study.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research history, methodology, and the corpus
  • 3.Etymology of the East Semitic ventive and its early life
  • 4.Non-motion usages of the ventive in OA
    • 4.1The ventive as a part of the 1st person singular object pronoun
    • 4.2The ventive as a “spacer”
  • 5.The ventive and dative pronouns on caused motion verbs
    • 5.1The ventive pointing to the addressee
    • 5.2The ventive pointing to the speaker
    • 5.3The ventive pointing to the speaker’s ‘us’
    • 5.4The ventive pointing to a non-SAP
  • 6.The ventive agreement
  • 7.Some ventive statistics for our OA corpus
  • 8.The ventive points to the writer’s future location
  • 9.The ventive points to a non-SAP location
  • 10.Discussion and conclusions
    • 10.1The two deictic shifts of the ventive
    • 10.2The ventive and personal object pronouns
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Bibliographical abbreviations
  • References
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Arkhipov, Ilya & Sergey Loesov
2025. Motion verbs and the ventive in the correspondence of Samsi-Addu, the king of Upper Mesopotamia (early eighteenth century bc). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 88:3 ► pp. 431 ff. DOI logo

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