Harkins, Jean (1995). Desire in language and thought: A study in cross-cultural semantics. PhD thesis, Australian National University. PDF (open access)
This thesis is a semantic-typological study of desiderative constructions in languages of the world. Focussing on both meaning and grammatical structures, it explores how the properties of desiderative expressions in languages of the world reflect universal elements and language-specific configurations of meaning.
Chapter One sets out the nature and scope of the work, explaining the purpose of examining desiderative constructions across languages, and outlining the theoretical context and orientation of the study. Chapter Two presents a typological overview of desiderative expressions in a selection of languages from diverse genetic groups throughout the world, noting cross-linguistic trends in lexical relations and syntactic patterns associated with desiderative constructions. Chapter Three focusses on grammatical properties of desiderative expressions across languages, exploring how the semantics and grammar of different construction types interact with the meanings of individual lexemes to encode a range of desiderative meanings. Chapter Four examines multifunctional grammatical morphemes with desiderative functions, using the principles of NSM analysis to investigate whether they have a single meaning or semantic core, or are truly polysemous. A set of procedures is proposed for specifying how many meanings a grammeme has, and how these relate to its various grammatical functions. Chapter Five compares constructions where a desiderative expression takes a complement clause (as in English I want to dance), and those where a desiderative grammeme occurs within the same clause that represents the wanted event (as in the Kayardild equivalent Ngada wirrka-ju), and explores the interpropositional nature of desiderative meaning. Chapter Six pursues the question of WANT as a semantic and lexical universal, in view of the diversity of desiderative constructions across languages. Specific criteria are proposed for the assessment of semantic equivalence across languages, and for distinguishing language-specific phenomena from potentially universal elements and configurations of meaning. This leads to a proposal for a ‘universal syntax’ of desiderative meaning. The influence of cultural values and attitudes on the expression of desire is explored with a view to explaining aspects of the interaction between social and linguistic structure and its impact on the range and types of desiderative constructions found in different languages, and how a theory of language universals might deal with processes of language change.
