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Description:
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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.
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