Temperature terms in northern Vanuatu
Résumé
Oceanic languages generally have a small set of lexemes encoding temperature predicates – no more than two or three words in each language. Focusing on a sample of languages from northern Vanuatu, this study describes their temperature terms, analyses the syntax of their various case frames, and highlights relevant semantic contrasts. The temperature lexicons in this area appear to display a limited array of polysemies across semantic domains – whether compared to other languages of the world, or to other semantic domains in the same languages.