Gastvortrag von Prof. Dr. Peter K. Austin (Department of Linguistics, SOAS, University of London):

Mittwoch, 29.11.2017

10.30 - 12.00 Uhr

Gebäude 24.21 in Raum 00.66

This paper is a discussion of how emotions and perceptions are lexically and grammatically encoded in some Aboriginal languages spoken in South Australia and Western Australia, based on data collected in fieldwork over the past 40 years. We show that terms for feelings and emotions in these languages are nouns that occur in unusual syntactic constructions or take special category-changing morphology to allow them to be used as verbs. We also look briefly at some body part metaphors for expressing emotions. In Australian languages perceptions are generally expressed as verbs, however there are also special affixes that encode information based on sensory evidence combined with culturally-determined beliefs. Reflexive constructions with perception verbs also show interesting ‘split personality’ effects.