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Putting and Taking in Tamil and Hindi

  • Bhuvana Narasimhan
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Events of Putting and Taking
This chapter is in the book Events of Putting and Taking

Abstract

Many languages have general or “light” verbs used by speakers to describe a wide range of situations owing to their relatively schematic meanings, e.g., the English verb do that can be used to describe many different kinds of actions, or the verb put that labels a range of types of placement of objects at locations. Such semantically bleached verbs often become grammaticalized and used to encode an extended (set of) meaning(s), e.g., Tamil veyyii ‘put/place’ is used to encode causative meaning in periphrastic causatives (e.g., okkara veyyii ‘make sit’, nikka veyyii ‘make stand’). But do general verbs in different languages have the same kinds of (schematic) meanings and extensional ranges? Or do they reveal different, perhaps even cross-cutting, ways of structuring the same semantic domain in different languages? These questions require detailed crosslinguistic investigation using comparable methods of eliciting data. The present study is a first step in this direction, and focuses on the use of general verbs to describe events of placement and removal in two South Asian languages, Hindi and Tamil.

Abstract

Many languages have general or “light” verbs used by speakers to describe a wide range of situations owing to their relatively schematic meanings, e.g., the English verb do that can be used to describe many different kinds of actions, or the verb put that labels a range of types of placement of objects at locations. Such semantically bleached verbs often become grammaticalized and used to encode an extended (set of) meaning(s), e.g., Tamil veyyii ‘put/place’ is used to encode causative meaning in periphrastic causatives (e.g., okkara veyyii ‘make sit’, nikka veyyii ‘make stand’). But do general verbs in different languages have the same kinds of (schematic) meanings and extensional ranges? Or do they reveal different, perhaps even cross-cutting, ways of structuring the same semantic domain in different languages? These questions require detailed crosslinguistic investigation using comparable methods of eliciting data. The present study is a first step in this direction, and focuses on the use of general verbs to describe events of placement and removal in two South Asian languages, Hindi and Tamil.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Contributors ix
  4. Preface xi
  5. Putting and taking events 1
  6. Part I. Lexical semantics
  7. The linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Jahai 21
  8. “She from bookshelf take-descend-come the box” 37
  9. To ‘put’ or to ‘take’? 55
  10. The encoding of placement and removal events in ǂĀkhoe Haiǁom 79
  11. The semantics of placement and removal predicates in Moroccan Arabic 99
  12. Placement and removal events in Basque and Spanish 123
  13. On the use of PUT Verbs by multilingual speakers of Romansh 145
  14. Probing the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish 167
  15. The semantic role of agentive control in Hungarian placement events 183
  16. Putting and Taking in Tamil and Hindi 201
  17. Part II. (A)symmetries in encoding placement vs. removal events
  18. The Thaayorre lexicon of putting and taking 233
  19. The expression of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ events in Japanese 253
  20. Put and Take in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island 273
  21. Take it up, down, and away 297
  22. Semantic granularity of placement and removal expressions in Polish 327
  23. How to put and take in Kalasha 349
  24. Language index 367
  25. Subject index 369
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.100.14nar

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Contributors ix
  4. Preface xi
  5. Putting and taking events 1
  6. Part I. Lexical semantics
  7. The linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Jahai 21
  8. “She from bookshelf take-descend-come the box” 37
  9. To ‘put’ or to ‘take’? 55
  10. The encoding of placement and removal events in ǂĀkhoe Haiǁom 79
  11. The semantics of placement and removal predicates in Moroccan Arabic 99
  12. Placement and removal events in Basque and Spanish 123
  13. On the use of PUT Verbs by multilingual speakers of Romansh 145
  14. Probing the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish 167
  15. The semantic role of agentive control in Hungarian placement events 183
  16. Putting and Taking in Tamil and Hindi 201
  17. Part II. (A)symmetries in encoding placement vs. removal events
  18. The Thaayorre lexicon of putting and taking 233
  19. The expression of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ events in Japanese 253
  20. Put and Take in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island 273
  21. Take it up, down, and away 297
  22. Semantic granularity of placement and removal expressions in Polish 327
  23. How to put and take in Kalasha 349
  24. Language index 367
  25. Subject index 369
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