Posture, location, existence, and states of being in two Central Australian languages

Title
Posture, location, existence, and states of being in two Central Australian languages
Publication Date
2002
Author(s)
Goddard, Cliff
Harkins, Jean
Editor
Editor(s): John Newman
Type of document
Book Chapter
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Place of publication
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Edition
1
Series
Typological Studies in Language (TSL)
UNE publication id
une:2246
Abstract
In many languages of Aboriginal Australia and elsewhere, verbs of posture are used for a wide range of positional, locational, existential, and copula-like functions, in addition to depicting human postures such as standing, sitting, and lying. In this chapter we examine the range of use of the relevant verbs in two languages of Central Australia - Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara (PlY) and Arrernte - which are geographically contiguous but not closely related genetically. Using semantic and syntactic tests and procedures, we tease apart different meanings and uses of these verbs in the two languages. We take the view that, even for the purposes of general linguistic description of the kind offered here, it is necessary to have some semantic framework. Without some theory of meaning in language, we would have no criteria for deciding whether or not a lexical item has one or more senses, and if so, how discrete these are from one another, in what way they are related, and what are the correlations between their meanings and their grammatical properties. Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework (Wierzbicka 1996, Goddard 1998), our aim in this chapter is to give a semantically informed description of these verbs and their functions, though we stop short of a comprehensive analysis of their lexical content. After our descriptive account, we return to a brief discussion of relevant semantic issues in the concluding section.
Link
Citation
The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying, p. 213-238
ISBN
9027229570
1588112047
Start page
213
End page
238

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