The Semantic Nature of Deictic Verb Take

Abstract

The present paper aims to investigate the semantic nature of take from the point of view of cognitive semantics to show that take is not necessarily a deictic verb. It is not unusual that take and bring are considered to be verbs of opposite meaning in the same way as go and come, while the sentence “I took the book from her,” is acceptable, where the patient(the book) moves from the origin(her)to the speaker as the destination(I). This sentence is semantically extended to generate “I took a whiff of the coffee,” which also shows un-deictic nature of take as well as take+action noun construction.