In:From Polysemy to Semantic Change: Towards a typology of lexical semantic associations
Edited by Martine Vanhove
[Studies in Language Companion Series 106] 2008
► pp. 291–301
Eating beyond certainties
Published online: 21 November 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.106.14hen
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.106.14hen
The aim of this study is to give a crosslinguistic account of semantic paralellisms concerning verbs meaning “eat”. It is mainly based on both synchronic and diachronic data from Indo-European languages, and some comparisons are made with data from a few languages from other genetic stocks: Nahuatl, Mwotlap, Inuit and classical Arabic. The semantic parallelisms are organized semantically into three categories: concrete aspects, perceptual aspects and cognitive aspects. The study of the data suggests the possibility that there exists some universal semantic association for the concept of eating with the concepts of suffering and tormenting.
Keywords: diachrony, eat, etymology, heterosemy, polysemy, semantic parallel, semantic shift, synchrony
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Legallois, Dominique
2021.
The French ditransitive transfer construction and the
complementarity between the meta-predicates give, take, keep,
leave
. In Give Constructions across Languages [Constructional Approaches to Language, 29], ► pp. 97 ff.
Forth, Christopher E.
Steinbach-Eicke, Elisabeth
2019. Taste metaphors in Hieroglyphic Egyptian. In Perception Metaphors [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 19], ► pp. 145 ff.
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