Verbs of Wearing in Creek (Muskogee)

要旨

This paper describes lexical and morphological factors involving the semantics of clothing verbs in the Creek (or Muskogee) language of east-central Oklahoma.I In Creek, verbs of wearing are generally more specific than comparable English verbs in describing the manner in which an object of clothing is placed on the body.While English may thus use put on for virtually any type of clothing, Creek uses over a dozen different verbs depending on the type of action involved (for example, putting on a hat as distinguished from putting on a glove).Other distinctions include direction (whether the clothing is being put on or taken off), number, aspect (putting on vs. wearing), and middle vs. active voice (putting on oneself vs. putting on someone else).Studies of unrelated languages (e.g., Mccawley 1978 for Japanese) demonstrate considerable complexity in this verb class, and recent dictionaries of other Muskogean languages (Sylestine et al. 1993, Munro and Willmond 1994, Kimball 1994) suggest classifications which are at once similar to and different from the Creek system.Our research is meant as a contribution to a crosslinguistic description of the verbs in this domain, and to a better understanding of how words and morphological processes in Creek combine to create subtle semantic distinctions. Putting clothes on oneself.There is no general clothing verb in Creek, but the verb vccetv /acc-itl1/ is used for any loose item of clothing covering the torso (such as a dress, shin, skirt, shawl, or blanket): 2 (I) Honnvn acces./h6nna-n a:cc

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