Felix K. Ameka | Department of African Languages and Cultures, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
Semanticists continue to debate questions like: are meanings about “things in the world” or “things in the mind”? Are meanings about algebraic calculations or about cultural conceptions? How are multiple senses of a word related? This chapter explores some of these questions through a detailed semantic analysis of two verbs in Ewe (Gbe), a Kwa language of West Africa. I argue that the senses of the verbs involve directional opposition: mie ‘germinate/dry up’ and dró ‘put load up on/down from head’. As such they are auto-antonyms. From a logical point of view, the interpretations of the verb mie may not look antonymous, but from the perspective of cultural practices and conceptualisations the image schematic representations go in opposite direction. I propose Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)-inspired semantic representations for the verbs which show the contrasts transparently.
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2020. The comparative semantics of verbs of ‘opening’: West Africa vs Oceania. In Meaning, Life and Culture: In conversation with Anna Wierzbicka, ► pp. 33 ff.
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