Semantics etc.

In our article on universals in semantics, Lisa Matthewson and I discuss the question of what, if any, universally present lexical items there are. We cite an article by Cliff Goddard (2001. “Lexico-Semantic Universals: A Critical Overview”. Linguistic Typology, 5(1): 1–65), who reviewed the state of the art on that question. He argues that Japanese does not have a word for “water” per se:

Surprising as it may seem to English speakers, “water” is probably not a universal lexical unit. Japanese has two words (mizu and yu) for “water”, with yu (often with an honorific prefix o–) being reserved for hot water (Suzuki 1978: 51–52). Mizu cannot be used about hot water. Furthermore, combining the adjective atsui “hot” with mizu sounds unnatural — Suzuki calls it “self-contradictory” — though there is no such restriction in relation to other liquids, e.g., atsui miruku “hot milk” (cf. Wierzbicka 1996: 229). These facts imply that mizu and yu both have a reference to temperature built into their meanings.

In our draft, we expressed some skepticism:

We have our suspicions that there is a possible pragmatic explanation in which yu means “hot water” while mizu means just “water” but because of the available option of yu implicates “cold water”. We can’t pursue this here.

This was, of course, armchair science of the worst kind. But that’s why science is a collective and collaborative enterprise. Eric McCready quickly wrote from Tokyo to refute our suggestion. After some back and forth and some fieldwork that he conducted, he has come around:

After asking judgments from a number of people with various examples, it seems that you guys were right after all. Here’s a simple variation on your running water example; this is extremely natural.

The example is this:

Koko mizu  deru?

here water come.out

Un,  oyu       dake dakedo ne

yeah hot.water only though PT

“Can you get water out of here (e.g. faucet)? Yeah, but only hot water.”

So, it seems that our armchair guess was right: Japanese does have a word for water: mizu, but in most contexts it implicates coldness because of the availability of the equally natural yu “hot water”. One needs to control for implicature if one wants to test for the lexical content of a morpheme/word.

As a proud “Doktorvater”, I would like to announce that Tamina Stephenson’s PhD thesis Towards a Theory of Subjective Meaning is now completed and available at the Semantics Archive.