Verbs of Closing and Opening: Towards a Lexical Typology

P. 250–252.

Olga Vinogradova, Sidorova M., Zhornik D., Kashkin E.

The paper deals with the lexical typology of words which refer to closing (cf. English close, shut, lock, cover, bar, etc.) and opening (open, uncover, unlock, unwrap, etc.). The former domain includes situations of preventing access to a static object by creating a barrier, whereas the latter deals with creating access to a static object by removing a barrier. In particular, we have singled out the following situations involved in lexical oppositions:

• Barrier in a building (door, window), sometimes requiring Instrument 
• Barrier for the motion
• Barrier for the visual perception of a functional part (book, newspaper)
• “Self-closing” body parts (eyes, mouth),
• Covering (in contact with a surface), with further distinctions between complete and partial coverage, flexible and inflexible Instrument 
• Containers (pan, bag): sometimes the same verb as used for covering with sth. flexible (seal).
• Hole with a possible difference between filling in a 3-D space and just covering a split or fracture in a flat surface
• Barrier for the visual perception or for impact

Some situations of closing can be conceptualized by lexemes from other domains.

Verbs of opening are often asymmetrical to verbs of closing, which provides a cross-linguistic confirmation and some new perspectives to the idea of asymmetry between antonyms and which in our case concerns particular lexical collocations, the general structure of semantic oppositions, and constructional patterns.

Keywords: frame semantics, lexical typology, lexical semantics, semantics of verbs

Publication based on the results of: Growth areas in a language structure: researches in corpora and corpus-based simulations (2017)

In book

Societas Linguistica Europaea - 50th Annual Meeting

Zürich: [б.и.], 2017.