Events of Putting and Taking

Events of putting things in places, and removing them from places, are fundamental activities of human experience. But do speakers of different languages construe such events in the same way when describing them? This volume investigates placement and removal event descriptions from 18 areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages. Each chapter describes the lexical and grammatical means used to describe such events, and further investigates one of the following themes: syntax-semantics mappings, lexical semantics, and asymmetries in the encoding of placement versus removal events. The chapters demonstrate considerable crosslinguistic variation in the encoding of this domain, as well as commonalities, e.g. in the semantic distinctions that recur across languages, and in the asymmetric treatment of placement versus removal events. This volume provides a significant contribution within the emerging field of semantic typology, and will be of interest to researchers interested in the language-cognition interface, including linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

Enrique L. Palancar, SeDyl, CNRS, in Journal of Historical Linguistics Vol. 6:1 (2016), pp. 124-127:
This volume on the Zapotec languages is an important contribution to the building of a solid typology of valence changes from languages which take a solid lexical stand on the phenomenon. This volume presents Zapotec morphology, for the first time, to a wide audience. This is a laudable achievement in its own right.