HOW TO HAMMER A SHIRT APART (AND TALK ABOUT IT): UNUSUAL INSTRUMENT THEME CONFIGURATIONS AND COMPLEX PREDICATES ACROSS LANGUAGES

Juergen Bohnemeyer
University of Buffalo-SUNY

with Nick Enfield (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), James Essegbey (University of Florida at Gainesville), Asifa Majid (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), and Miriam van Staden (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

Saturday, January 20, 10:45 AM MJH Rm 126


We examine the treatment of atypical instrument-theme configurations in events of caused separation in material integrity (Hale & Keyser 1987) – i.e., “cutting” and “breaking” (C&B) events - across languages. We focus on four languages which offer an alternative between monomorphemic verb roots and various kinds of complex predicates in the C&B domain: serial verb constructions in Lao and Sranan, compound verb stems in Yucatec Maya, and prefix verbs, particle verbs, resultative constructions, and light verb constructions in German. We test the hypothesis that in accordance with Grice’s (1989) Manner maxims, across languages, complex predicates are preferred over simplex predicates for reference to atypical instrument-theme configurations. We draw on descriptions of the “Cut and Break Clips” (Bohnemeyer, Bowerman, & Brown 2001) from five speakers per language. We treat the typicality of a scene as the degree to which it matches the prototype of any linguistic description, and rely primarily on inter-speaker variation as a measure of (a-)typicality in this sense. In line with our hypothesis, we found that the higher the amount of inter-speaker variation a scene elicited in a given language, the more likely the speakers of that language were to prefer complex over simplex predicates. However, though highly significant for the other three languages, this correlation is not significant for German. In German, simplex verbs play no more than a marginal role in the C&B domain; we argue that this upsets the division of labor between simplex and complex expressions underlying the relation between Gricean stereotype and manner implicatures.