The article deals with verbs describing motion of substances (‘fl ow’, ‘stream’, ‘pour’ etc.) in three Finno-Ugric languages (Komi, Western Khanty, and Hill Mari), which were not considered in the previous typological studies of this domain. The article is aimed at identifying the semantic oppositions between such verbs from the typological perspective. The material has been collected primarily in fieldwork by elicitation and is compared to the data available in dictionaries (sometimes coming from other language varieties). Methodologically, I rely on the frame-based approach to lexical typology, which involves collocational analysis as the key procedure for highlighting semantic oppositions A sketch of falling verbs in each language is provided (focusing on how the basic parameters of cross-linguistic variation are realized in my sample), since they are contiguous to the domain being in the main focus. The main part of the article provides the description of flowing & pouring verbs in each language from the sample. I discuss several semantic features of these verbs, such as the opposition between a stream and drops, the colexification of moving liquids and granular substances (with some language-specific constraints dealing with some properties of the situations), special lexemes for small amounts of liquids emitted from some entity, etc. Some issues underdescribed in typological studies are touched upon (e.g. a special verb in Khanty for small portions of liquids or pouring substance moving in the air, such as fog or flour). The semantic connections between, on the one hand, flowing & pouring, and, on the other hand, falling of multiple subjects are analyzed, taking into account the restrictions on the subject of falling (natural entity vs. artifact, size of singular entities) and on the whole situation (distributivity) available for this colexification pattern. Other polysemy patterns developed by the verbs in question are considered as well, e.g. the extension of the basic lexeme kis’s’yny ‘flow, pour’ in Komi to some situations of destruction
The paper deals with verbs of throwing in Hill Mari (Finno-Ugric). The data were collected in fieldwork mainly by elicitation, as well as by analyzing the corpus of transcribed oral narratives. First of all, two dominant lexemes of this semantic field are taken into account. These lexemes display clear differences in their Aktionsart properties. The differences between the lexemes with regard to a number of parameters previously proposed in typology are investigated, their relevance is evaluated. New parameters for their opposition are put forward. In addition, the article discusses the peripheral verbs of adjacent semantic fields (destruction and distribution in space). The correlations between more general distributive semantics of the peripheral lexemes and their semantic content in the contexts of throwing are considered. Special attention is paid to the grammaticalization of dominant verbs of throwing in complex verb constructions and to the analysis of their distributional constraints. Both the similarities between the constructions (participant with a semantic role of Patient, semantics of destruction) and the diff erences between them (constraints on plurality) are studied. Data on complex verb constructions are also discussed in the light of the cross-linguistic variation in the semantic shifts typical of the domain under consideration
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