The Linguistics of Eating and Drinking

This volume reviews a range of fascinating linguistic facts about ingestive predicates in the world’s languages. The highly multifaceted nature of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ events gives rise to interesting clausal properties of these predicates, such as the atypicality of transitive constructions involving ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ in some languages. The two verbs are also sources for a large number of figurative uses across languages with meanings such as ‘destroy’, and ‘savour’, as well as participating in a great variety of idioms which can be quite opaque semantically. Grammaticalized extensions of these predicates also occur, such as the quantificational use of Hausa shaa 'drink’ meaning (roughly) ‘do X frequently, regularly’. Specialists discuss details of the use of these verbs in a variety of languages and language families: Australian languages, Papuan languages, Athapaskan languages, Japanese, Korean, Hausa, Amharic, Hindi-Urdu, and Marathi.

Randy J. LaPolla, La Trobe University:
This volume is the third in a set edited by John Newman exploring the conceptualizations of basic and universal human activities such as giving; sitting, standing and lying; and eating and drinking, and the effects they have on language development: how they are coded, and what sorts of metaphorically-based grammaticalizations develop from the forms used to code these activities. This work is important in that it looks at fine details of structure and conceptualization in several languages not often covered in standard grammars, and adds greatly to the literature on ethnosyntax, that is, literature establishing the connections among cognition, social behaviour, and linguistic structure. In that it will be of value not only to linguists, but to anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists as well.