Women, Bride-price and baskets, SOAS, University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2015-03-09

http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/
This Linguistics seminar by Debbie Hill (University of Canberra) titled "Women, Bride-price and baskets: Cultural Salience and the organising principle of a semantic domain" was given at SOAS, University of London on 14 October 2014

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Studies of action verbs, including verbs cutting and breaking, eating and drinking, and carrying have shown that it is not uncommon for languages spoken in technologically simple societies to have a number of lexically specific verbs in a semantic domain that reflect the material culture and cultural practices of the community. What is less clear is whether there are organising principles underpinning these domains in each language and thus what lexically specific verbs in a semantic domain have to contribute to broader issues of lexical semantics.

Longgu, an Oceanic language spoken by about 3000 speakers on the north-­‐east coastal fringe of Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands) has about a dozen verbs that refer to ways in which humans carry children and things on their body. All verbs in this domain specify a part of the body involved in the action (e.g. the head, shoulders, back); some differ along other parameters (e.g. whether the carrier is female or male or either, whether the thing carried is human or not, whether the manner in which something is carried is specified).  

At the heart of Longgu culture is the bride-­‐price feast, sungi, at which the pera basket, which is made for women to carry on their heads, is used to transfer shell money to the bride’s family from the groom’s family. There is a conceptual link between the heterosemous pair sungi ‘bride-­‐price feast’ and sungi-­a, ‘to carry on one’s head’. This presentation discusses the cultural salience of the semantic domain of ‘carrying’ in Longgu, and demonstrates the relationship between material culture (the pera basket), cultural practices (sungi ‘bride-­‐price feast) and modes of carrying. The data suggest that an organizing principle, based on the cultural prominence of one verb (sungi-­a) underpins the domain. Moreover, two verbs within the domain (sungi-­a ‘carry something on the head’ and ango’inia ‘carry something on the shoulder’) select for the semantic gender of the carrier, demonstrating that the lexical semantics of these verbs reflect cultural practices in this domain.