Abstract
The article deals with verbs describing motion of substances (‘fl ow’, ‘stream’, ‘pour’ etc.) in three Finno-Ugric languages (Komi, Western Khanty, and Hill Mari), which were not considered in the previous typological studies of this domain. The article is aimed at identifying the semantic oppositions between such verbs from the typological perspective. The material has been collected primarily in fieldwork by elicitation and is compared to the data available in dictionaries (sometimes coming from other language varieties). Methodologically, I rely on the frame-based approach to lexical typology, which involves collocational analysis as the key procedure for highlighting semantic oppositions A sketch of falling verbs in each language is provided (focusing on how the basic parameters of cross-linguistic variation are realized in my sample), since they are contiguous to the domain being in the main focus. The main part of the article provides the description of flowing & pouring verbs in each language from the sample. I discuss several semantic features of these verbs, such as the opposition between a stream and drops, the colexification of moving liquids and granular substances (with some language-specific constraints dealing with some properties of the situations), special lexemes for small amounts of liquids emitted from some entity, etc. Some issues underdescribed in typological studies are touched upon (e.g. a special verb in Khanty for small portions of liquids or pouring substance moving in the air, such as fog or flour). The semantic connections between, on the one hand, flowing & pouring, and, on the other hand, falling of multiple subjects are analyzed, taking into account the restrictions on the subject of falling (natural entity vs. artifact, size of singular entities) and on the whole situation (distributivity) available for this colexification pattern. Other polysemy patterns developed by the verbs in question are considered as well, e.g. the extension of the basic lexeme kis’s’yny ‘flow, pour’ in Komi to some situations of destruction
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