Eating and drinking are, one might say, human universals. Or so it may seem to speakers of English, and other European languages. But what would a Kalam, or a Warlpiri linguist say about it, given that Kalam and Warlpiri have no word meaning ‘eat’ and no word meaning ‘drink’? No doubt, he/she would say that ñb- (Kalam, roughly ‘eat/drink’) or ngarni (Warlpiri, roughly ‘eat/drink’) is a human universal. This paper argues that describing languages like Kalam and Warlpiri through the prism of the English words eat and drink is Eurocentric and it proposes to complement such an Eurocentric approach with a more neutral one, based on empirically established conceptual universals such as body, part, do, and inside (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka eds 2002; Wierzbicka 2007)
2019. From words-as-mappings to words-as-cues: the role of language in semantic knowledge. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 34:10 ► pp. 1319 ff.
Lupyan, Gary & Martin Zettersten
2021. Does Vocabulary Help Structure the Mind?. In Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, ► pp. 160 ff.
Næss, Åshild
2011. The Grammar of Eating and Drinking Verbs. Language and Linguistics Compass 5:6 ► pp. 413 ff.
Taljard, Elsabé & Nerina Bosman
2014. The Semantics of Eating in Afrikaans and Northern Sotho: Cross-linguistic Variation in Metaphor. Metaphor and Symbol 29:3 ► pp. 224 ff.
Velleman, J. David
2014. Doables. Philosophical Explorations 17:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Wierzbicka, Anna & Cliff Goddard
2018. Talking about our Bodies and their Parts in Warlpiri. Australian Journal of Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Wu, Tana
2023. Metaphors and culturally unique idioms of eating and drinking in Mongolian. Language and Cognition 15:1 ► pp. 173 ff.
Ye, Zhengdao
2019. The Emergence of Expressible Agency and Irony in Today’s China: A Semantic Explanation of the New Bèi-construction. Australian Journal of Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
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