Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bean, Susan S.

Titel

The Meanings of Grammatical Number in Kannada

Ist Teil von

• Anthropological linguistics, 1975-01, Vol.17 (1), p.33-41

Ort / Verlag

Bloomington, Ind: Archives of Languages of the World, Anthropology Department, Indiana University

Erscheinungsjahr

1975

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The meanings of two words in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in Karnataka State, India, are analyzed. These words (yeekavacana and bahuvacana) and their meanings are of interest for a number of reasons. First, they are words about language. As such, they provide a source of information about how speakers understand and manipulate their language. Second, they are words used to discuss both linguistic and sociolinguistic phenomena, e.g., grammatical number, familarity or politeness of personal reference forms, and the social character of persons who utter or receive particular reference forms. Third, the multiple uses of the terms provide an interesting case of polysemy and a fruitful field for the application of analytical methods developed in structural semantics for relating, formally, the multiple senses of a linguistic form. In particular, the concept of metaphor is central to the analysis of the relationship between the several senses of the terms. The relationship between grammatical number and the familiarity or politeness of personal reference forms is demonstrated to be metaphoric, resting on the nature of dyadic and triadic social relationships. AA