EAT, DRINK, MAN, WOMAN AND ALL THAT: THE LINGUISTICS OF ORDINARY HUMAN EXPERIENCE
John Newman
University of Alberta, Canada; Monash University, Australia
I explore a range of linguistic phenomena associated with some very familiar facets of human experience, such as ingestion (eating and drinking), being at rest (sitting, standing, lying),perception (seeing and hearing), and others. These are relatively basic categories of human experience and, as such, warrant attention from cognitive linguists.
In this talk I will highlight a range of lexical, constructional, and semantic properties associated with the linguistic realization of the concepts behind these experiences. I make use of different kinds of data and methods, but at the heart of my approach is a commitment to appreciating the full diversity of the world’s languages. My talk is intended,in part, to remind cognitive linguists of our obligations to study and learn from the languages of the world, not just the familiar major languages that tend to dominate experimental and corpus-based research.
