New book:Grammar and Mind

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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
A Conceptual Analysis of Tongan Spatial Nouns:
>From  Grammar to Mind

GIOVANNI BENNARDO
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In Churchward (1953) a set of Tongan nouns are labeled 'local', that is
"construed as if it were the proper name of a place" (p. 88). Some of
these nouns reappear under another label, that is, 'preposed' nouns (p.
214-16) and they are defined as nouns that can be "placed immediately
before another noun instead of being connected with it by means of a
preposition" (p.214). This peculiarity was exploited by Broschart (1993)
to argue for a subset of these nouns to be considered as classifiers. In
this work the author tries to clarify the border of this fuzzy subset of
Tongan nouns differently addressed by Churchward and Broschard.

The analysis of this newly defined subset of Tongan nouns, 'spatial'
nouns, is conceptual, that is, based on a set of primitive (and possibly
universal) spatial concepts suggested by Lehman & Bennardo (1992) and
Bennardo (1993, 1996). The conceptual apparatus is the result of
extensive analyses conducted on both English and Tongan spatial
prepositions. Further analyses regarded representations of spatial
relationships in other languages like Burmese, Thai and Italian.

Following Lucy's suggestion, grammatical features of the Tongan language
represent the path along which the conceptual analysis moves. In fact,
five structural contexts in which the 'spatial' nouns appear represent
the starting point of the analysis. The analysis will weave through the
grammatical and conceptual levels and will end up in sorting the nouns
into three separate groups according to a combination of their
conceptual content and grammatical possibilities. Finally, the results
of this analysis call for an interesting modification of the conceptual
apparatus.

3 89586 917 1.
Languages of the World 12.
34pp. USD 10.50 / DM 22 / # 6.80.




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