[New publication] The Semantics of Nouns

Description: This volume brings together the latest research on the semantics of nouns in both familiar and less well-documented languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, the Papuan language Koromu, the Dravidian language Solega, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara from Australia. Chapters offer systematic and detailed analyses of scores of individual nouns across a range of conceptual domains, including ‘people’, ‘places’, and ‘living things’, with each analysis fully grounded in a unified methodological framework. They not only cover central theoretical issues specific to the analysis of the domain in question, but also empirically investigate the different types of meaning relations that hold between nouns, such as meronymy, hyponymy, taxonomy, and antonymy.

The collection of studies show how in-depth meaning analysis anchored in a cross-linguistic and cross-domain perspective can lead to unexpected insights into the common and particular ways in which speakers of different languages conceptualize, categorize, and order the world around them. This unique volume brings together a new generation of semanticists from across the globe, and will be of interest to researchers in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, biology, and philosophy.

Table of Contents:

1. The semantics of nouns: A cross-linguistic and cross-domain perspective, Zhengdao Ye
2. The meaning of kinship terms: A developmental and cross-linguistic perspective, Anna Wierzbicka
3. The semantics of social relation nouns in Chinese, Zhengdao Ye
4. Touring the Anglo, Arab, and Israeli worlds with ‘angels’, Sandy Habib
5. Personhood constructs in language and thought: New evidence from Danish, Carsten Levisen
6. Some key body parts and polysemy: A case study from Koromu (Kesawai), Carol Priestley
7. The semantics of standing water places in English, French, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara, Helen Bromhead
8. The semantics of demonyms in English: Germans, Queenslanders, and Londoners, Michael Roberts
9. The semantics of honeybee terms in Solega (Dravidian), Aung Si
10. Furniture, vegetables, weapons: Functional collective superordinates in the English lexicon, Cliff Goddard
References
Index