The domains of ‘soft’, ‘hard’, ‘tough’ in hill mari

Abstract

The article deals with terms for qualities (adjectives and adverbs) which refer to whether an object easily changes its shape under pressing down (‘soft’, ‘flexible’, ‘loose (sand)’, on the one hand, and ‘hard’, ‘tough’, ‘springy’, ‘solid’, ‘stiff’, on the other). The data come from the Eastern local varieties of Hill Mari (the village of Kuznetsovo and its surroundings), a language close to Meadow Mari and belonging to the Uralic family. Both literal and figurative uses of the lexemes are considered. The research mostly involves field data on the combinability of lexical units collected by elicitation following the frame-based approach to lexical typology. Some examples from a field text corpus are also used, as well as published lexicographic sources. The classes of objects and situations described by each lexeme are systematized: the oppositions between them depend on the physical characteristics of an object, as well as on the typical pattern of the interaction between an experiencer and an object. Each of the antonymic domains includes, along with dominant lexemes, a set of lexemes with a narrower meaning, such as a special adjective for an object which could be flexible, but requires much effort to be folded or cannot be folded at all. I also discuss the connections emerging in Hill Mari between the domains in question and some other domains (wetness; surface texture; visual evaluation of shape). The metaphorical shifts are touched upon; their inventory in however smaller than in the standard varieties of the Mari languages.