Work

‘She had just cut/broken off her head’: Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal

Year: 2007

Type: article

Abstract: This paper describes the lexical resources for expressing events of cutting and breaking (C&B hereafter) in the Mayan language Tzeltal. This notional set of verbs is not a class in any grammatical sense; C&B verbs are formally undistinguishable from many other transitive state-change verbs. But they nicely reveal the characteristic specificity of Tzeltal verb semantics: C&B actions are finely differentiated according to the spatial and textural properties of the theme object, with no superordinate term meaning ‘either cut in general’ or ‘break in general’. The paper characterizes the semantics of these verbs and shows that in the great majority of cases it does not predict their argument structure.

Source: Cognitive Linguistics

DOI: 10.1515/cog.2007.019

Author: Penelope Brown

Institutions: Max Planck Society, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Language: English

Topic: Categorization, perception, and language

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W1993344847

FWCI: 7.29

Cites: 8

Cited by: 65

Related to: 10