Universal meaning extensions of perception verbs are grounded in interaction
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- Avatime Duna Italian Semai
The Avatime, Duna, Italian, and Whitesands multi-sense verbs have a default association with hearing. The Semai verb rasaak ‘touch, taste’ and Tzeltal verb chiknaj ‘perceive’ (both of which were quite infrequent, occurring four times each) were not attested with transfield semantic associations. As for the modality-specific perception verbs, we first present examples of extensions that fit the meaning groups identified in Table 1 and collate the cross-linguistic results (Table 5). We then present language-specific extensions of multi-sense verbs, followed by contextualized examples of discourse uses. Table 5: Recurrent semantic associations for multi-sense verbs. Gray indicates a meaning of this kind was attested in the conversational data.
Cognition-related uses of multi-sense verbs were attested in Avatime, Duna, Spanish and Tzeltal. In Avatime and Duna, cognition meanings of multi-sense terms were to do with the comprehension of language (cf. 5, above), whereas Spanish siento referred to impressionistic knowledge (in fact, similar to cognition uses of English feel). Example (10) shows a case from Tzeltal where a’y ‘sense’ has the cognition meaning ‘know’. (10)
‘We can’t know how it [a kind of medicine] gives a bit of strength.’ (Tze_337/PB) Multi-sense terms in Duna, Italian, and Tzeltal had attentional associations. In Duna, the relevant example related to attending to speech (as per the audition verbs discussed in Section 3.2), while Italian sentire was used to describe focused attention to food (checking its readiness). For Tzeltal, the multi-sense verb a’yoccurs with the meaning ‘look after’, used where the speaker talks about the importance of attending to the needs of others and propagating pro-social behaviour (11). (11)
‘It’s that you need, you see, to lovingly look after your neighbors. ma ma j-le k’op-ok-at — ma xmilawanat ma x’elk’ajat ma xa’pas mul ‘Don’t look for a fight — don’t go around killing, stealing, doing bad things.’ (Tze_122/PB) Meanings about locating things and about trying recurred across the vision verbs in our data (Section 3.1). There was also one instance of a multi-sense term being used with a locating meaning, found in Whitesands, and one instance of a sense>try extension, found in Tzeltal. Table 5 summarizes the semantic extensions of multi-sense terms presented so far. While only a few languages attest relevant meanings (much fewer than, for example, sight verbs), four different meaning groups are represented, suggesting greater semantic range than hearing verbs. Moving beyond the familiar extensions in Table 5, six unique meanings of multi-sense verbs were also identified (Supplementary Materials: S32–S37). The Duna multi-sense verb can mean ‘ask’, while Italiansentire can be used to describe remote communication, similar to English expressions such as ‘hear from’. These examples hark back to the connection between hearing verbs and linguistic communication (§3.2). Showing off an impressive semantic range, Tzeltal a’y ‘sense’ was used in descriptions of physical pain, of inclination (e.g., to feel like doing something), and emotional disposition, as well as occurring in construction with nominal phrases to mean ‘undertaking’ or ‘doing’ something. Overall, these data suggest that multi-sense terms in conversation have complexes of meanings that differ from language to language, but in many cases show a relationship to modality-specific polysemies that have been reported for other languages (e.g., audition>understanding, as already discussed; or touch>pain and taste>preference, identified as common extensions by Sweetser 1990). As well as showing a wide array of transfield meanings, multi-sense perception verbs can be used with discourse functions. We found that speakers of Avatime, Duna, Italian (see Enghels and Jansegers 2013;Tanghe and Jansegers 2014), Tzeltal, and Whitesands all used their multi-sense verbs to manage aspects of the conversation. Example (12), from Avatime, illustrates the discourse use of a multi-sense verb in a directive. The verb is used to redirect the trajectory of a course of action in conversation, and simultaneously prepare the addressee for the upcoming shift. Anna has come to Caro’s beauty salon in southern Ghana to try on a new wig in preparation for a funeral. For Anna, the wig represents a substantial financial investment and in this sequence, after a lapse in the conversation of over 13 seconds (not shown), Anna expresses what we might call buyer’s remorse. Using the multi-sense perception verb nu (translated here aslisten) the hairdresser redirects the line of talk away from Anna’s troubles and invites a more positive assessment of her current situation. (12)
Anna’s statement is an example of what Jefferson (1984) has identified as a “troubles telling”, which makes relevant a range of possible next actions, such as an expression of empathy or a solution to the trouble (cf.Kendrick and Drew 2016). However, the response that the hairdresser (Caro) provides departs from this trajectory and instead solicits agreement to a positive assessment of Anna’s appearance, thereby shifting the course of action from commiseration to celebration. Such discontinuity can be a source of misalignment in that a recipient may be unable to anticipate and thus may fail to recognize the next action (e.g., an “out of the blue” change in topic; see Drew 1997). Caro’s use of the perception verb in (12) is remarkably similar to a practice described for English, whereby turn-initial look “serves to mark a disjunction and redirection of the talk away from the conditionally relevant next action and towards some alternative” (Sidnell 2007: 387). Thus, these perception verbs help to manage and align the expectations of interlocutors concerning the course of their talk together. Moving away from the discursive directives examined so far (see 4, 7, 12), a prominent use of the Tzeltal multi-sense verb a’y was to register information and express understanding of a prior speaker’s talk (13). In this example, Agustin asks the whereabouts of his uncle (also a kinsman of Nicolás, Agustin’s interlocutor). After several intervening turns, wa’y acknowledges that an adequate response has been given, moving the sequence to a close. (13)
After Nicolás first answers the question, Agustin initiates repair, treating the answer as inadequate. After Nicolás gives more information concerning the uncle’s location, Agustin again initiates repair with an interjection jej ‘eh?’. After no response comes, he initiates repair again with a repetition of the place namexixintonil together with an insertion of the particle to ‘up until’. Both the prosodic composition of jej and the semantics of the particle to display the speaker’s surprise or disbelief at the information — a recurrent use of other-initiations of repair (see, e.g., Selting 1996 on German). Such practices of repair usually serve as what Schegloff (1992) calls a “defense” of intersubjectivity in conversation. Misunderstandings, whether due to troubles of hearing, understanding, or believing, constitute one recurrent basis for misalignment between participants. In this case, after Nicolás eventually provides additional information about the location of the uncle, Agustin registers the information with wa’y, displaying a change of epistemic status (cf. Heritage 1984). This information uptake treats Nicolás’ solution to the trouble as adequate, restores intersubjective alignment, and brings the question-answer sequence to a close. The use of a perception verb to register information has an analogue in English see in a phrase like I see, which can also occur in a similar position, following an adequate answer to a question. Overall, multi-sense terms complicate the investigation of sensory polysemy, as we cannot always trace a clear relationship between one particular sensory modality and its associations; perhaps it is not appropriate to think of things in terms of single sensory modalities at all (e.g., Lynott and Connell 2009). While many of the extensions we see are familiar, they are not always those we might expect. In several instances, multi-sense verbs have extensions more typically found with sight verbs in other languages, including cognition, attention, locating and trying, as well as the use as a discourse marker denoting information uptake (i.e., parallel to English I see). This would seem to argue for a relatively holistic view of sensory perception as a source domain for semantic and pragmatic extensions, as cross-linguistic correspondences are found across, as well as within, modalities. Yüklə 94,32 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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