Literal and metaphorical usages of Babanki EAT and DRINK verbs

In Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of North-West Cameroon, two of the numerous consumption verbs, namely the generic verbs ʒɨ́ ‘eat’ and ɲʉ́ ‘drink’, constitute a major source of metaphorical extensions outside the domain of ingestion. Setting out from a characterisation of the basic meanings of these two lexical items as they emerge from their paradigmatic relations within the semantic field of alimentation processes, this paper explores the figurative usages of the two verbs and their underlying semantic motivations. Semantic extensions that radiate from eat can be subsumed under two closely related structural metaphors, i.e. APPROPRIATION OF RESOURCES IS EATING and WINNING IS EATING. The first metaphor construes the acquisition and exploitation of non-food items such as material possession as eating, while the second metaphor casts the acquisition of immaterial advantage in the mould of eating. Both metaphors have further entailments, i.e. the derivation of pleasure from consumption of resources, the depletion of resources via consumption and the deprivation of a third party from access to these resources. Semantic extensions that radiate from drink can be accounted for in two structural metaphors, i.e. INHALATION IS DRINKING and ABSORPTION IS DRINKING. Remarkably, some metaphorical extensions of consumption verbs attested in other African languages, such as extensions of EAT for sexual intercourse and for killing, and the extensions of DRINK for undergoing trouble and enduring painful experiences are absent in Babanki

Telicity marking in Hungarian

L

Language and food : food and language

Eating and talking are universal human traits. Every healthy human being eats and talks; every society or group eats and talks. Both language and food are culturally dependent and vary according to factors such as gender, age, or situational context, or even lifestyle. There are vast differences both in the food-related behavior of different cultures as well as in the languages of the world. There is nothing natural or inevitable about food preferences or syntactic structures. “Food is a bridge between nature and culture” (Fischler 1988 in Germov & Williams 2008: 1)1 and so is language. Brillat-Savarin, one of the earliest food writers, claimed: “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are” (1825: 3). Again, linguists and other social scientists have shown that identity is constructed through language. Hence, “every coherent social group has its own unique foodways” (Counihan 1999: 6) and its own unique language use. You are different or you are the same depending on what you eat and how you speak. “If we are to understand women’s gender roles..., we need to study food” (Inness 2001a: 4) and, the linguist adds, language. “If there is one issue as deeply personal as food it is language and dialect” (Delamont 1995: 193)

Implicit indefinite objects at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface: a probabilistic model of acceptability judgments

Optionally transitive verbs, whose Patient participant is semantically obligatory but syntactically optional (e.g., to eat, to drink, to write), deviate from the transitive prototype defined by Hopper and Thompson (1980). Following Fillmore (1986), unexpressed objects may be either indefinite (referring to prototypical Patients of a verb, whose actual entity is unknown or irrelevant) or definite (with a referent available in the immediate intra- or extra-linguistic context). This thesis centered on indefinite null objects, which the literature argues to be a gradient, non-categorical phenomenon possible with virtually any transitive verb (in different degrees depending on the verb semantics), favored or hindered by several semantic, aspectual, pragmatic, and discourse factors. In particular, the probabilistic model of the grammaticality of indefinite null objects hereby discussed takes into account a continuous factor (semantic selectivity, as a proxy to object recoverability) and four binary factors (telicity, perfectivity, iterativity, and manner specification). This work was inspired by Medina (2007), who modeled the effect of three predictors (semantic selectivity, telicity, and perfectivity) on the grammaticality of indefinite null objects (as gauged via Likert-scale acceptability judgments elicited from native speakers of English) within the framework of Stochastic Optimality Theory. In her variant of the framework, the constraints get floating rankings based on the input verb’s semantic selectivity, which she modeled via the Selectional Preference Strength measure by Resnik (1993, 1996). I expanded Medina’s model by modeling implicit indefinite objects in two languages (English and Italian), by using three different measures of semantic selectivity (Resnik’s SPS; Behavioral PISA, inspired by Medina’s Object Similarity measure; and Computational PISA, a novel similarity-based measure by Cappelli and Lenci (2020) based on distributional semantics), and by adding iterativity and manner specification as new predictors in the model. Both the English and the Italian five-predictor models based on Behavioral PISA explain almost half of the variance in the data, improving on the Medina-like three-predictor models based on Resnik’s SPS. Moreover, they have a comparable range of predicted object-dropping probabilities (30-100% in English, 30-90% in Italian), and the predictors perform consistently with theoretical literature on object drop. Indeed, in both models, atelic imperfective iterative manner-specified inputs are the most likely to drop their object (between 80% and 90%), while telic perfective non-iterative manner-unspecified inputs are the least likely (between 30% and 40%). The constraint re-ranking probabilities are always directly proportional to semantic selectivity, with the exception of Telic End in Italian. Both models show a main effect of telicity, but the second most relevant factor in the model is perfectivity in English and manner specification in Italian

Culinary Linguistics

Language and food are universal to humankind. Language accomplishes more than a pure exchange of information, and food caters for more than mere subsistence. Both represent crucial sites for socialization, identity construction, and the everyday fabrication and perception of the world as a meaningful, orderly place. This volume contains an introduction to the study of food and an extensive overview of the literature focusing on its role in interplay with language. It is the only publication fathoming the field of food and food-related studies from a linguistic perspective. The research articles assembled here encompass a number of linguistic fields, ranging from historical and ethnographic approaches to literary studies, the teaching of English as a foreign language, psycholinguistics, and the study of computer-mediated communication, making this volume compulsory reading for anyone interested in genres of food discourse and the linguistic connection between food and culture

Polskie i rosyjskie czasowniki jedzenia : studium leksykalno-semantyczne

The following thesis belongs to the field of lexical-semantic studies. It aims at a confrontativedescription of Polish and Russian verbs relating to the physiological domain of eating. Verbs denoting the function of eating (in both Polish and Russian linguistics) remain a relatively unexplored and least described lexical category. The present work attempts to identify these verbs and perform their semantic analysis using tools created on the grounds of structural, cognitive and cultural semantics. The analysis consists of three stages. It is performed separately for each subject group. Each research stage is summarised and comparative conclusions are presented. The first stage explicates the meaning structure of Polish and Russian eating verbs, exposed through their decomposition into simpler semantic components (a componential paradigmatic analysis). Next, out of the field of eating verbs, non-synonymous expressions are singled out, grouped into synsets (sets of synonyms). Then, the basic contexts of their occurrence are identified (a componential syntagmatic analysis). The second stage illustrates the fundamental mechanisms of the occurrence of metaphorical meanings on the example of verbs central to the field of eating (a lexical subcategorization, conceptual metaphors). The third stage recreates the more important non-definitional content associated with the base verbs of eating and their expressive synonyms (semantic connotations). The observation of the most common idiomatic expressions, proverbs in which these verbs occur and a review of the representative groups of expressive synonyms have also allowed to make an attempt at reconstructing a fragment of linguistic image of eating reinforced by these synonyms. Apart from an introduction and conclusions the work includes two basic parts: theory and research which are further divided into chapters and subchapters. The first chapter is devoted to the discussion of the current state of research into verbs of eating. The second chapter presents a framework for their description. A detailed description of the selected class of verbs (analysed in three main approaches) is found in the third analytical chapter. Findings of the conducted comparative are presented in appendixes. They can be used in academic didactics in preparation of teaching and learning resources for learners of Russian or Polish as a foreign language, compiling monolingual or bilingual dictionaries as well as in translation

Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs

The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences