‘Please open the fish’: Verbs of separation in Tidore, a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia

This article discusses the semantics of verbs of separation in Tidore. Tidore is particularly rich in this domain, with many verbs cross-classifying different aspects of separation events. An empirical investigation into this domain showed that the domain of cutting and breaking verbs as distinct from other verbs of separation (open) is not straightforward in Tidore. In their morphosyntactic behavior the verbs turned out to be unusual because morphological causatives were found with unaccusative as well as with transitive and labile verbs. Furthermore, the labile verbs were shown to express both cutting and breaking semantics.