The ventive and the deictic shift: The case of Old Assyrian

Studies in Language. 2025. Vol. 49. No. 1. P. 93–118.

Sergey Koval, Loesov S.

The Old Assyrian language is a branch of East Semitic. East Semitic has been extinct since around 400 BCE. The Old Assyrian texts 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 traced in the etymological part of the study.

Keywords: дейксис, deixis, Verbs of motion, глаголы движения, morphosyntax, морфосинтаксис, аккадский язык, Akkadian language

Publication based on the results of: Semitic lexicography in synchrony and diachrony (2023)