Conférencier : Christopher Davis, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of International Languages and Cultures, University of the Ryukyus

Titre : « An eater’s guide to Mlabri predicates »

Résumé : 

This talk focuses on some issues in lexical semantics, with a particular focus on some recent fieldwork on verbs of eating in Mlabri. There are distinct verbs in this language selecting for different types of object (meat, soup, fruits/vegetables/noodles, etc). The talk discusses how the restriction in these verbs might be encoded, and looks at recent fieldwork data on the surprising behavior of such verbs in sentences involving negation and exclusive particles (“only”). Connections are made to some parallel issues in the behavior of classifiers in Japanese.