Concept sharing across verb classes and metaphors in Banjara

Abstract

Concept sharing across verb classes is a novel thing in cognitive linguistics. Earlier to this newlinemany researchers in this area have worked on other grammatical categories like nouns, newlineadjectives and other classes. Apart from working on these grammatical categories they also newlinehave worked on various sub-classes of these grammatical categories, especially in major newlinelanguages. None of the works has made an effort to think from the indigenous or tribal language newlineperspectives. Since the research belongs to an indigenous community called the Banjara newlinelanguage, an effort has been made to work on this language by taking inputs from the earlier newlineworks. After selecting the language verbs classes and prototypes are considered as the major newlinetheme of the present work. Apart from verb classes and prototypes, the study also attempted to newlinelook at the metaphors and their generation with the help of various software available in the newlinefield of cognitive linguistics. newlineThe word prototype has been derived from the industrial perspective, especially, making a newlineprototype design of a particular instrument or an object. For example, if one takes into newlineconsideration the aeroplane, it has various subparts to come to the conclusion of the imaginary newlinein our mind that it is an aeroplane. Now, there is a question which one we call as a prototype, newlinewhether the subparts of the aeroplane or the final outcome of the aeroplane is called as a newlineprototype. This was worked extensively by various researchers in the field of cognitive newlinelinguistics, especially Eleanor Rosch which is prominent work in the field. The same concept newlineis applied for the first time to the English language. The present work is a replica of the work newlinedone on English language carried out by Rosch in 1983. All the experiments were divided into newlinefour tasks, viz. Mental rotation task, direct grading, free association and metaphor generation newlinetask. The first three include various types of verbs drawn from the Banjara language. The fourth newlinetask is metaphor generation which is a higher level than the verb classe