Semantic Continuity in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Evidence from Slavic Verbs of Pulling and Pushing

Abstract

This article presents some results of cross-linguistic research on verbs of pushing and pulling in nine Slavic languages. These data call into question the traditional notion of the semantic field as a clear-cut class of lexical units. It is shown that, due to semantic adjacency, fields may overlap, so that in different languages the same event may be described by verbs that would be assigned to different semantic fields in the traditional approach. The violation of inter-field boundaries is evidenced by both synchronic and diachronic data.