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)
2021. Does Vocabulary Help Structure the Mind?. In Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, ► pp. 160 ff.
Lupyan, Gary & Molly Lewis
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.
Ye, Zhengdao
2019. The Emergence of Expressible Agency and Irony in Today’s China: A Semantic Explanation of the NewBèi-construction. Australian Journal of Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Goddard, Cliff
2018. Minimal English: The Science Behind It. In Minimal English for a Global World, ► pp. 29 ff.
Wierzbicka, Anna & Cliff Goddard
2018. Talking about our Bodies and their Parts in Warlpiri. Australian Journal of Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
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