The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying (review)

The fifteen papers in The linguistics of sitting, standing and lying treat a number of phenomena concerning posture verbs in a wide sample of the world’s languages. While a few of the articles deal with the lexical meanings of such verbs and their morphosyntactic patterns, the majority are concerned with the development of these verbs in the expression of abstract grammatical relations, particularly as copular/locative verbs and/or markers of imperfective aspect (progressive, habitual, etc.).

John Newman’s introduction, ‘A cross-linguistic overview of the posture verbs “sit”, “stand”, and “lie” ’, gives a summary of the main topics covered in the book, presenting various issues concerning the synchronic behavior of posture verbs and the diachronic processes they enter into. Nick J. Enfield’s article, ‘Semantics and combinatorics of “sit”, “stand”, and “lie” in Lao’, reports on posture verbs in Lao, and he discusses, among other things, constraints on object selection according to typical associations between a given posture verb and some physical object (e.g. ‘lie’ can take the object ‘straw mat’ but not ‘tree’). John Newman and Toshiko Yamaguchi (‘Action and state interpretations of “sit” in Japanese and English’) examine expressions for moving into a sitting position versus remaining in a sitting position in English and Japanese, and Sally Rice (‘Posture and existence predicates in Dene Sųrłiné [Chipewyan]: Lexical and semantic density as a function of the “stand”/“sit”/“lie” continuum’) studies posture verbs according to ten semantic and morphosyntactic properties, finding clear evidence that ‘sit’ behaves differently from other posture verbs in a number of ways. Next, Michael Noonan and Karen Grunow-Hårsta (‘Posture verbs in two Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal’) compare and contrast the lexical and morphosyntactic distribution of posture verbs in Magar and Chantyal.

Other articles in the book deal with extended (i.e. more grammatical) uses of posture verbs. Marten Lemmens (‘The semantic network of Dutch posture verbs’) looks at the prolific use of such verbs in Dutch to refer to location. Raquel Guirardello Damian (‘The syntax and semantics of posture forms in Trumai’) reports on the use of posture verbs in Trumai, an isolated language spoken in Brazil. Alan Rumsey (‘Men stand, women sit: On the grammaticalization of posture verbs in Papuan languages, its bodily basis and cultural correlates’) offers a study of posture verbs as existential predicates in Enga and Ku Waru (Papuan). Cliff Goddard and Jean Harkins (‘Posture, location, existence, and states of being in two Central Australian languages’) compare the use of posture verbs in various lexical and grammatical contexts in Arrente and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. Finally, Nicolas Reid (‘Sit right down the back: Serialized posture verbs in Ngan’gityemerri and other Northern Australian languages’) studies patterns of grammaticalization involving posture verbs in a group of related languages from Australia.

The remaining articles examine extended uses of posture verbs in other languages/language families. František Lichtenberk (‘Posture verbs in Oceanic’) reports on the temporal contours of posture verbs and the relationship of temporal extension to aspectual meaning. Christa Kilian-Hatz (‘The grammatical evolution of posture verbs in Kxoe’) discusses the evolution of posture verbs into various tense/aspect markers in Kxoe (Khosian). John Keegan (‘Posture verbs in Mbay’) considers the grammatical use and development of posture verbs in another African language, Mbay (Nilo-Saharan). Jae Jung Song (‘The posture verbs in Korean: Basic and extend uses’) looks at four posture verbs and their lexical/grammatical uses in Korean. The final chapter, by Raymond Gibbs (‘Embodied standing and the psychological semantics of stand’), summarizes experimental findings regarding the cognitive motivation for the figurative uses of stand in English.