Knight, Emily (2008). Hyperpolysemy in Bunuba, a polysynthetic language of the Kimberley, Western Australia. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 205-223). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.102.13kni
Like a number of other Kimberley languages, Bunuba has very few morphologically simple verbs. Most verbs (including exponents of some semantic primes, such as WANT, SEE, and THERE IS) consist of an inflected auxiliary combined with an invariable coverb. After a brief review of how other predicate primes are expressed in Bunuba, the main body of the chapter considers semantic primes SAY, DO, THINK, HAPPEN, and FEEL, which, it is argued, are all expressed by a single, morphologically simple Bunuba verb MA. Detailed language-internal evidence is adduced to support the existence of this striking five-way polysemy. It is shown that each of the five identifiable lexical units has a distinctive syntactic/semantic profile. These facts are incompatible with alternative analyses which posit a single general abstract meaning.
