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<p class="MsoNormal">Dear Horia,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is likely to be a biological reason for this: approximately 90% of the world’s human population is right-hand dominant. So right-handedness is egocentrically assumed to be “normal” by the right-handed majority regardless of one’s
language, and left-handedness is viewed as gauche. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Metaphor may be responsible for particular connotations associated with direction, e.g. up is positive, down/south is negative. You might also expand your investigation to look at deictic verbs of motion ‘go’ and ‘come’, which correlate
with movement into a marked state, and conversely, return to an unmarked state in English and Thai, and possibly in other languages<i>.
</i>A possible paper of interest is:</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Gandour, Jack.<span style="color:#222222"> 1978.</span> ‘On the deictic uses of verbs of motion ‘come’ and ‘go’ in Thai.
<i><span style="color:#222222; border:none windowtext 1.0pt; padding:0cm">Anthropological Linguistics</span></i><span style="color:#222222">, v20 n9 p381-94.</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Alec</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:9.0pt"><span style="font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:black">Assoc. Prof. Alexander R. Coupe, Ph.D.
</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:#FB0007">|
</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:black">Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
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<a href=""><span style="color:#0000E9">arcoupe@ntu.edu.sg</span></a> </span><span style="font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:#FB0007">|</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:black"> Web:
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; color:black">From: </span>
</b><span style="font-size:12.0pt; color:black">Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Horia Calugareanu <horia.calugareanu@gmail.com><br>
<b>Date: </b>Thursday, 28 February 2019 at 8:23 PM<br>
<b>To: </b>"lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Subject: </b>[Lingtyp] Languages with connotations for 'left' and 'right'</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Dear colleagues,<br>
<br>
I am putting together a semantic typology in order to test the following hypothesis:<br>
<br>
Across languages, the word for left (side/direction) (or some derivation of it) tends to get a negative connotation, whereas the word for ‘right’ gets a positive one, if the effect exists.<br>
<br>
Apart from Indo-European languages, where the effect is widely present, this is a non-exhaustive list of languages which prove the thesis: Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Fula, Golpa, Hungarian, Malay, Turkish.<br>
<br>
Do you know of any other (preferably non-Indo-European) languages which help confirm or infirm the generalisation?<br>
<br>
Finally, I am also researching whether the effect holds anyhow in languages with allocentric frames of reference (i.e. uphill/downhill, or north/south, instead of left/right). I haven’t been able to find any due to scarce resources, but some examples of languages
with non-egocentric FoR are Tseltal, Haillom, Guugu Yimitirr, Kuuk Thaayorre. <br>
<br>
Thank you very much. <br>
<br>
Kind regards,<br>
Horia Călugăreanu<br>
University College London</p>
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