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Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Ekaterina V. Rakhilina

”Some like it hot”: On the semantics of temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish

Keywords: temperature adjectives, anthropocentricity, adjective-noun combinability, nominal classification, tactile vs. non-tactile perception

The paper focuses on the main temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish, which are analysed and compared to each other on the basis of their combinability with nouns. Each of the two linguistic systems is strongly rooted in human experience of temperature. First, temperature attributes are chosen relatively to several temperature values or parameters, that are important and salient for humans and have only very approximate physical correlates. Second, physical objects differ considerably as to whether their temperature properties are ever registered by humans, or considered as important and worth mentioning, primarily depending on their function in the human life.

STUF – Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Akademie Verlag

Print ISSN: 0942-2919
Volume: 59, 03/2006
Pages: 253 - 269

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