[Lexicog] semantic domains

[Wayne Leman]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, Rudolph C Troike
<rtroike at u...> wrote:


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morpheme verbs have been replaced by Noun + Light Verb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
--- End forwarded message ---