Toward a geotypology of EAT-expressions in languages of Asia: Visualizing areal patterns through WALS

Abstract

Many of the languages of Asia have families of expressions in which a verb meaning EAT exhibits Janus-faced behavior. In some cases the subject of EAT bears the semantic role of an agent while in others it bears the role of a theme, patient, or experienccr. A central concern of this paper is to characterize the geographic distribution in Asia of the semantic extensions of the experientially basic verb EAT in selected languages. We graph the areal distribution of representative EAT expressions as sets of data points on WALS maps and show that while some metaphoric extensions of usage of the verb EAT are probably found in every language, other particular types of extensions are found only in a specific area whose languages share a number of typological characteristics as shown by Masica (1976) in his seminal work on the SOV linguistic area of South, Central, and Northeast Asia. While language contact certainly has played and continues to play a significant role, we propose the independent operation of a radial network of semantic extensions as a possible complementary factor in the proliferation and convergence of EAT-expressions.