Head movement and motion events in Takituduh Bunun

The aim of this paper is to explore the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the Takituduh Bunun (Austronesian: Central Taiwan) motion prefix u-, glossed as MOT. One central function of this prefix is to encode translocative motion. It can attach to a general locative marker, location nouns, nouns that denote places, and place names to derive a verbal constituent that encodes translocative motion. We propose that these morphologically complex path verbs derived via the motion prefix u- are the result of extensive concatenation of syntactic heads, and that this analysis accounts for the word order and case marking patterns associated with these verbs. Furthermore, we show that these morphologically complex path verbs can occur together with manner-of-motion verbs to form serializing satellite-framed structures. We argue that the combination of extensive concatenation of syntactic heads together with satellite-framed clause structures is possible since Takituduh Bunun allows for multiple verbalizations (i.e. several iterations of the classifying head v) and that any attempts at deriving the distinction between Satellite-framed and Verb-framed languages via syntactic rules must also be able to account serializing languages such as Takituduh Bunun.