LINGUIST List 9.1655

Sat Nov 21 1998

Qs: Semantic dotting, Articulatory setting

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Victor Pekar, Distribution of semantic dotting
2. Noel Hunt, Articulatory setting

Dear Linguists,

In his article on spatial language (Talmy L. How Language Structures
Space. In H. Pick and L. Acredolo, eds., Spatial Orientation: Theory,
Research, and Application. New York: Plenum. 1983) L.Talmy presents a
theory according to which "a language must provide a sufficiently
distributed and dense (but not too dense) dotting of semantic
"n"-dimensional space -- over individual semantic domains as well as
over the whole." (p.279). Berlin&Kay's study of color terms seems to
confirm this theory for the domain of color terms. I wonder if there
are other studies which would explicitly confirm presence of this
regularity in other specific lexical fields.

If there is enough interest for the topic I'll post a summary.

Thank you.

Victor Pekar

I would appreciate any information about articulatory setting for
Chinese and Korean. Timothy Vance's book (Vance, T. J., An
Introduction to Japanese Phonology, State University of New York
Press, 1987) covers the topic well for Japanese but I would like
information about the above two languages (perhaps with a comparison
with the English articulatory setting).

Thank you.