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Part of
The Typology of Physical Qualities
Edited by Ekaterina Rakhilina, Tatiana Reznikova and Daria Ryzhova
[Typological Studies in Language 133] 2022
► pp. 215–268

Chapter 8
Talking temperature with close relatives

Semantic systems across Slavic languages

| Stockholm University

The chapter compares the temperature adjectives (‘hot’, ‘cold’ etc.) across Slavic against a broader typological background. The comparison targets both the systems as a whole and the forms involved in them. The main questions are how (dis)similar the temperature systems of closely related languages can be, and what is stable vs. changeable in the temperature terms of closely related languages. Slavic languages show substantial cross-linguistic variation in their systems (ranging from two to four main temperature values), while on the whole confirming several earlier tentative generalizations in Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2015). The temperature terms themselves differ in stability, both in meaning and in form (with ‘warm’ being the most stable term on both counts), even though most of them are traceable to proto-Slavic and even to proto-Indo-European.

Keywords: temperature, Slavic, lexical stability, semantic change, semantic system predicative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Introducing the linguistics of temperature
  • 3.The temperature adjectives in Russian
  • 4.Slavic temperature adjectives for the warming zone (’warm’, ’hot’, ’extremely hot’): forms and origin
  • 5.Temperature-frame distinctions across Slavic
  • 6.The ‘warm’ vs. ‘hot’ distinction in Slavic
  • 7.Slavic temperature adjectives for the cooling zone (‘cool’, ’cold’, ’extremely cold’): forms and origin
  • 8.The ‘cold’ vs. ‘cool’ distinction in Slavic
  • 9.In-between temperatures: ‘Lukewarm’
  • 10.Wrapping up the Slavic comparison
    • 10.1How (dis)similar are the temperature systems across Slavic?
    • 10.2What is stable vs. changeable in the temperature terms across Slavic?
  • 11.Slavic temperature-term systems in a broader cross-linguistic perspective
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 25 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.133.08kop
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Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria
2022. Semantic maps and temperature: Capturing the lexicon-grammar interface across languages. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41:1 ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo

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