Fw: [Lexicog] semantic domains

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Rudolph C Troike" <rtroike at u.arizona.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 11:13 PM
Subject: RE: [Lexicog] semantic domains


>
>
> Peter is quite right about the issue, but it goes further than the
> event-thing distinction, since in many American Indian languages, e.g.,
> the famous example of Hopi, "object" names like "house" are verbal
> predicates, so that the translation of "This is a house" would be more
> like "This houses". This would indeed drastically affect the ratio of
> nouns vs verbs. I know of no study of this ratio, but it may be because it
> is not a very significant point to study.
>
> Peter is also right about the history of Persian, in which older single-
> morpheme verbs have been replaced by Noun + Light Verb (like "do", "make")
> over the centuries as the only productive process, leaving few original
> simplex verbs. This seems to be a common process in SOV languages, as in
> Korean and Japan, where Chinese verbs were borrowed as Noun + Light Verb
> ("ha" in Korean, "su" in Japanese), and now English words can form the
> basis of new verbs in this manner. The process in Persian seems to have
> spread from the Dravidian languages in India, where it has gone on so long
> that the light verbs have become suffixes rather than independent bases,
> and are being phonetically eroded away, leaving the originally attached
> morpheme as first a root and then as the full Verb itself, now creating
> all new simplex verbs. This again would raise the question as to the
> significance of questioning the ratio of nouns to verbs, since this might
> change over time in a single language.
>
> Rudy Troike
> University of Arizona
>
>
>
>
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