Verbs of falling in Chukchi

The paper focuses on the lexicalization of falling events in Amguema Chukchi, which is a variety of the eastern dialect of Chukchi, spoken by inland reindeer herders in the tundra around the village of Amguema in the Chukotka Peninsula. The data on which the research is based were collected in course of authors’ own fieldwork. The research is done in the framework developed by the Moscow Lexical Typology Group: the authors investigate different frames pertaining to the conceptual field of falling, checking whether they can or cannot be lexicalized by several verbs that the language possesses.

The system has two main verbs, peqetatək, which denotes falling from a higher level to a lower one, and eretək, which is used to describe toppling down of vertically oriented elongated objects. For example, only the former will be used in a sentence describing a cup falling from a table onto the ground, and only the latter describes falling down of a tree during a windstorm or of a person who has slipped up. This semantic opposition is cross-linguistically recurrent, furthermore, it is the major opposition which structures the field of falling from the typological point of view.

The system is further furnished by several verbs which lexicalize narrow classes of situations: atsatək ‘topple down (of non-elongated objects that have a prototypical orientation in space and lose this orientation)’, kuwɬitkuk ‘roll down’, pəɬqetək ‘fall into water, drown’ и ŋərepetək ‘fall into a substance’.

Another interesting feature of the Chukchi system is the absence of metaphors with falling as source cognitive domain. This fact is cross-linguistically peculiar, as in general falling events are particularly prone to give rise to metaphors. Finally, the verbs ŋətək ‘break free from a leash, separate oneself from something’ и pirqək ‘bend down to earth’ develop secondary meanings that pertain to the semantic domain of falling, ‘fall out (e.g. of teeth or hair)’ and ‘sink in (e. g. of a tent)’ correspondingly.