Published by: englishcology (Karma: 4552.52) on 21 August 2009 | Views: 2402
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This volume reviews a range of fascinating linguistic facts about ingestive predicates in the world’s languages. The highly multifaceted nature of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ events gives rise to interesting clausal properties of these predicates, such as the atypicality of transitive constructions involving ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ in some languages. The two verbs are also sources for a large number of figurative uses across languages with meanings such as ‘destroy’, and ‘savour’, as well as participating in a great variety of idioms which can be quite opaque semantically. Grammaticalized extensions of these predicates also occur, such as the quantificational use of Hausa shaa 'drink’ meaning (roughly) ‘do X frequently, regularly’. Specialists discuss details of the use of these verbs in a variety of languages and language families: Australian languages, Papuan languages, Athapaskan languages, Japanese, Korean, Hausa, Amharic, Hindi-Urdu, and Marathi.
Table of contents
Preface
vii–xii
A cross-linguistic overview of 'eat' and 'drink'
John Newman
1–26
How transitive are 'eat' and 'drink' verbs?
Åshild Næss
27–43
Quirky alternations of transitivity: The case of ingestive predicates
Mengistu Amberber
45–63
All people eat and drink. Does this mean that 'eat' and 'drink' are universal human concepts?
Anna Wierzbicka
65–89
'Eating', 'drinking' and 'smoking': A generic verb and its semantics in Manambu
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
91–108
Athapaskan eating and drinking verbs and constructions
Sally Rice
109–152
The semantic evolution of 'eat'-expressions: Ways and byways
Peter Edwin Hook and Prashant Pardeshi
153–172
Literal and figurative uses of Japanese 'eat' and 'drink'
Toshiko Yamaguchi
173–193
What (not) to eat or drink: Metaphor and metonymy of eating and drinking in Korean
Jae Jung Song
195–227
Metaphorical extensions of 'eat' --> [OVERCOME] and 'drink' --> [UNDERGO] in Hausa
