Rights statement: This article has been accepted for publication in the journal, Functions of Language All contents © John Benjamins 2012.The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Sources of BET
AU - Ponsford, Dan
AU - Hollmann, Willem
AU - Siewierska, Anna
N1 - This article has been accepted for publication in the journal, Functions of Language All contents © John Benjamins 2012.The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - We investigate the sources of betting constructions, and specifically their predicates. The notion of risking something of value on an outcome is a complex one. Culturally, some degree of disposability of property is required. The concept is nevertheless lexicalized in many parts of the world. Betting takes various forms, ranging from betting between individuals, which we contend is the basic case, to betting in the context of an institution such as horse racing, cockfighting, lotteries, or on games such as card games. Taking a similar approach to Zalizniak (2008), we use polysemy as a means of investigating etymology. A sample of 271 polysemous predicates from 177 languages are surveyed, where one sense is BET. Treating relevant other senses as earlier senses, we find that the most frequent source concepts are ones that profile (in Langacker's 2008 sense) the relation between the bettor and the stake. The most frequent are SECURITY and PUT. Other important sources, profiling instead the relation between the bettors, are ARGUE, COMPETE and AGREE.
AB - We investigate the sources of betting constructions, and specifically their predicates. The notion of risking something of value on an outcome is a complex one. Culturally, some degree of disposability of property is required. The concept is nevertheless lexicalized in many parts of the world. Betting takes various forms, ranging from betting between individuals, which we contend is the basic case, to betting in the context of an institution such as horse racing, cockfighting, lotteries, or on games such as card games. Taking a similar approach to Zalizniak (2008), we use polysemy as a means of investigating etymology. A sample of 271 polysemous predicates from 177 languages are surveyed, where one sense is BET. Treating relevant other senses as earlier senses, we find that the most frequent source concepts are ones that profile (in Langacker's 2008 sense) the relation between the bettor and the stake. The most frequent are SECURITY and PUT. Other important sources, profiling instead the relation between the bettors, are ARGUE, COMPETE and AGREE.
KW - betting
KW - polysemy
KW - semantic change
KW - lexicalisation
U2 - 10.1075/fol.20.1.04pon
DO - 10.1075/fol.20.1.04pon
M3 - Journal article
VL - 20
SP - 90
EP - 124
JO - Functions of Language
JF - Functions of Language
SN - 1569-9765
IS - 1
ER -