[Lexicog] semantic domains

[Wayne Leman]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "Kenneth C. Hill"
<kennethchill at y...> wrote:
I'm afraid Rudy is in error regarding Hopi. The difference between
verbs
and non-verbs is quite clear. It may look like nouns can function like
verbs in Hopi because Hopi (like, e.g., Russian) lacks a copula
except for
morphologically marked (e.g., tensed) predicates. The element
equivalent
to a copula, called "nexus" [-NEX-] in the Hopi Dictionary, is
obligatory
under the right conditions with non-verbs and cannot be used with
verbs.

On the other hand, Hopi verbs do seriously outnumber Hopi nouns
because of
derivational patterns. In the Hopi Dictionary database as of today,
ignoring cross-reference entries (e.g., "plural of", "combining form
of"),
there are 16457 verb entries as compared with only 7701 noun entries.

These are not all different "lexical items" in any purist sense. For
example, I include as an entry the verb sowi'ingwmaqto 'go deer
hunting' <
sowi'ingw- (< sowi'ingwa 'deer') + maqto 'go to hunt' (< maaqa 'hunt'
+
-to 'pregressive') as well as tsöpmaqto 'go antelope hunting' (tsööviw
'antelope') because these occur in the corpus at hand. There is, of
course, in principle no limit to the nouns that can be incorporated
with a
stem like maqto.

But there is no Hopi noun "deerhunting" or any other nominal meaning
the
hunting of X. It is possible to form a noun meaning 'deer-hunter':
sowi'ingwmaqtongwunìiqa 'one who deer-hunts' (-ngwu 'habitual tense',
-nìi- 'nexus' [see above], -qa 'relativizer: one who does X'), but the
dictionary-maker is not tempted to include such a formation as an
entry.
It is probable that one could form a Hopi nominal
meaning 'deerhunting';
it would likely be based on a presently undocumented impersonal form
of
the verb ('for deer-hunting to take place'), but it would be quite
artificial and forced (and probably the underlying impersonal verb
would
be rejected as artificial as well). On the other hand, dictionary-
makers
of the rather "nouny" language English might be tempted to include the
quite natural "deerhunter" and "deerhunting" as lexical entries.

--Ken Hill

--- 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
>
>


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