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‘Please open the fish’: Verbs of separation in Tidore, a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia
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Miriam van Staden
Published/Copyright:
September 25, 2007
Abstract
This article discusses the semantics of verbs of separation in Tidore. Tidore is particularly rich in this domain, with many verbs cross-classifying different aspects of separation events. An empirical investigation into this domain showed that the domain of cutting and breaking verbs as distinct from other verbs of separation (open) is not straightforward in Tidore. In their morphosyntactic behavior the verbs turned out to be unusual because morphological causatives were found with unaccusative as well as with transitive and labile verbs. Furthermore, the labile verbs were shown to express both cutting and breaking semantics.
Keywords: cut and break; separation events; verb semantics; Tidore; Papuan languages; transitivity alternations
Received: 2005-01-27
Revised: 2006-07-21
Published Online: 2007-09-25
Published in Print: 2007-09-19
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
- Morpholexical Transparency and the argument structure of verbs of cutting and breaking
- How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages
- Cutting, breaking, and tearing verbs in Hindi and Tamil
- Cut and break verbs in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island
- ‘Chop, shred, snap apart’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Lowland Chontal
- Cut and break verbs in Sranan
- Cut and break verbs in Ewe and the causative alternation construction
- ‘Smash it again, Sam’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Jalonke
- Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre
- ‘He cut-break the rope’: Encoding and categorizing cutting and breaking events in Mandarin
- Lao separation verbs and the logic of linguistic event categorization
- ‘Please open the fish’: Verbs of separation in Tidore, a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia
- Cutting and breaking verbs in Otomi: An example of lexical specification
- ‘She had just cut/broken off her head’: Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal
- Semantic categories of cutting and breaking: Some final thoughts
Keywords for this article
cut and break;
separation events;
verb semantics;
Tidore;
Papuan languages;
transitivity alternations
Articles in the same Issue
- The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
- Morpholexical Transparency and the argument structure of verbs of cutting and breaking
- How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages
- Cutting, breaking, and tearing verbs in Hindi and Tamil
- Cut and break verbs in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island
- ‘Chop, shred, snap apart’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Lowland Chontal
- Cut and break verbs in Sranan
- Cut and break verbs in Ewe and the causative alternation construction
- ‘Smash it again, Sam’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Jalonke
- Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre
- ‘He cut-break the rope’: Encoding and categorizing cutting and breaking events in Mandarin
- Lao separation verbs and the logic of linguistic event categorization
- ‘Please open the fish’: Verbs of separation in Tidore, a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia
- Cutting and breaking verbs in Otomi: An example of lexical specification
- ‘She had just cut/broken off her head’: Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal
- Semantic categories of cutting and breaking: Some final thoughts
