Chapter 6 – Documenting lexical knowledge
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literally “hear (or feel, or understand) in the heart.” The Tzotzil phrase re-
quires morpho-syntactic completion: the transitive verb -a`i needs both a
syntactic subject (the one who presumably “treats” some matter) and object
(the “matter” treated). Moreover, the word -olonton ‘heart’ also requires an
obligatory possessor, which judging by the modern language must be
coreferential with the subject of the verb, thus “x hears with his/her OWN
heart” – not, with someone else’s. These morphosyntactic restrictions are
not obvious from the original usage. Nor is it clear that the expression is
limited to the sort of referential context suggested by the English (or original
Spanish) gloss: it seems instead simply to suggest careful consideration of
anything, whether a “negocio” ‘matter, business’ or something less specific
or concrete. Without access to fully fluent native speakers it is impossible
to supply more lexical detail. More problematic, and perhaps more relevant
to documenting an endangered language, is the case of an archaic word, or
one in limited use in a speech community. Again, Colonial Tzotzil provides
an instructive example. The ritual language of modern Tzotzil uses the ex-
pression tza-uk, evidently formed from a (non-attested) nominal root tza
plus an irealis or subjunctive suffix -uk. Laughlin (1975) suggests as a
meaning for tzauk ‘take heed’ – a translation suggested by knowledgeable
modern speakers. However, somewhat arbitrarily it seems, in the modern
dictionary he lists the word under the root tzak ‘catch, grab’. Only the dis-
covery of the Colonial dictionary (Laughlin 1988) revealed an archaic root
tza which has entirely fallen out of existence in Zinacantec Tzotzil except
for its surviving ritual use. The Colonial lexicographers recorded it with the
meanings “cleverness, cognizance, craftsmanship, guess, industriousness,
intelligence, opinion, prudence, skill, speculation, talent, thought,” but no
evidence is provided by modern usage.
Perhaps the oldest chestnut of anthropological linguistics is denotational
diversity in lexical mappings of “reality,” captured in the slogan that “dif-
ferent words” imply “different worlds.” One classic domain is ethno-
anatomy, the lexical (and thus, perhaps, conceptual?) slicing up of the body
into discrete parts. Whereas English speakers distinguish ‘hands’ from
‘arms’, Russian and Tzotzil speakers do not. Tzotzil has the single root
k’Ab
8
which can mean either ‘hand’ or ‘arm’. Worse, it can also mean
‘branch’, ‘sleeve’, ‘crossbar (of a cross)’, ‘front leg (of a cat)’, and so on.
Tzotzil ni` ‘nose’ denotes not only noses, but any relatively sharp-pointed
protrusion, or the thin end of almost any sort of object, not necessarily a
face or a head. So why privilege a ‘body part’ gloss like ‘hand’ or ‘nose’?
Perhaps a non-anatomical model is involved in such partinomies.
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John B. Haviland
Another possibility is that a “basic meaning” is extended in various ways
into a chain or continuum of derived meanings without well defined end-
points. Cruse (1986) argues that terms like ‘mouth’ in English participate in
“sense spectra” where each “derived” or “metaphorical” meaning leads to
another.
(2) “sense spectrum” (Cruse 1986: 71 ff.)
John keeps opening and shutting his mouth like a fish.
This parasite attaches itself to the mouths of fishes, sea-squirts, etc.
The
mouth of the sea-squirt resembles that of a bottle.
The
mouth of the cave resembles that of a bottle.
The
mouth of the enormous cave was also that of the underground
river.
The kinds of meaningful elements one chooses for a lexical database are
also inextricably linked to the whole of one’s categorial analysis for a lan-
guage, what “parts of speech” are postulated, and what sorts of semantic
profiles are associated with them. The standard formal semantic starting
point that nouns will map onto things (i.e. sets), adjectives to “properties”
(i.e. subsets), and verbs to events or states of affairs (predicates over n-
tuples of entities), quickly disintegrates in the face of the diverse sorts of
semantic conflation (Talmy 1985) routinely observed in lexical items. A
standard example is ‘climb’ in English, whose Frame Net
9
definition is: “to
move vertically usually upwards, usually with effort.” That is, the verb
suggests, in the default case, vertical movement upward, combined with the
sort of effort Fillmore called “clambering.” Either of these conflated ele-
ments – upward motion, or effort – can be suspended, but not both without
semantic oddness.
(3) Conflation in climb (Fillmore 1982)
The snake climbed (up) the tree.
The monkey climbed (up/down) the tree.
?The snake climbed down the tree.
Another commonplace of anthropological linguistics is that languages con-
flate semantic domains in unexpected ways, perhaps most characteristically
in verbs. For example, the following Tzotzil positional predicates all might
receive a similar English gloss ‘stuck’.