Motion events in Takituduh Bunun and Holistic Spatial Semantics

Abstract This paper examines how Takituduh Bunun (Austronesian: Taiwan) encodes translocative motion, using the framework of Holistic Spatial Semantics. Based on elicited field data, we identify key lexical and grammatical resources, including motion verbs, a productive motion prefix ( u -), and the locative voice. These interact flexibly to express basic semantic categories such as Path, Direction, Manner, and Region. We show that Takituduh Bunun challenges the traditional binary motion typology by relying extensively on morphological strategies rather than verb roots and their satellites. The ability to combine multiple form-meaning mappings in serial verb constructions and through voice morphology suggests a need to move beyond binary typologies and focus on the distributional properties of semantic categories across grammatical resources. Our findings highlight the importance of Formosan languages for a more inclusive typology of motion events and call for further attention to the role of morphology in spatial semantics.