Includes bibliographical references (pages 282-306) and index.
Contents:
Furniture, vegetables, weapons : functional collective superordinates in the English lexicon / Cliff Goddard. The meaning of kinship terms : a developmental and cross-linguistic perspective / Anna Wierzbicka -- The semantics of social relations in Chinese / Zhengdao Ye -- The meanings of 'angel' in English, Arabic, and Hebrew / Sandy Habib -- Personhood constructs in language and thought : new evidence from Danish / Carsten Levisen -- Some key body parts and polysemy : a case study from Koromu (Kesawai) / Carol Priestly -- The semantics of standing-water places in English, French, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara / Helen Bromhead -- The semantics of demonyms in English : Germans, Queenslanders, and Londoners / Michael Roberts -- The semantics of honeybee terms in Solega (Dravidian) / Aung Si -- Furniture, vegetables, weapons : functional collective superordinates in the English lexicon / Cliff Goddard.
Summary:
This volume brings together the latest research on the semantics of nouns in both familiar and less well-documented languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, the Papuan language Koromu, the Dravidian language Solega, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara from Australia. Chapters offer systematic and detailed analyses of scores of individual nouns across a range of conceptual domains, including 'people', 'places', and 'living things', with each analysis fully grounded in a unified methodological framework. They not only cover central theoretical issues specific to the analysis of the domain in question, but also empirically investigate the different types of meaning relations that hold between nouns, such as meronymy, hyponymy, taxonomy, and antonymy.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.