Source-Goal asymmetries in Ese Ejja

Ese Ejja (Takanan) is an endangered language spoken in the Bolivian and Peruvian lowlands. The paper examines the expression of Source and Goal in this Amazonian language and focuses on three types of Source-Goal asymmetries. The first asymmetry concerns the higher number of Goal adnominals than of Source adnominals. Linked to this morphological asymmetry, the second asymmetry is semantic: Goal adnominals display a [± human] distinction absent from Source markers. In addition, the two Goal adnominals are dedicated while the only adnominal that encodes Source may also encode Median. In fact, the unambiguous (and most frequent expression) of Source requires a biclausal strategy, which accounts for the third type of asymmetry, at the syntactic level. The discussion is based on firsthand data including both spontaneous and elicited data, mostly obtained with Trajectoire, a visual methodological tool designed to collect Path expression.