Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre

This paper presents the key Thaayorre verbs associated with events of cutting and breaking. It examines their intensional and extensional ranges; comparing prototypical usages with non-prototypical extensions. Although these Thaayorre verbs categorize the C&B semantic domain largely in accordance with the crosslinguistic patterns reported by Majid et al. (this issue), there are several interesting points of divergence. These include the union of breaking and opening events encoded by thuuth ‘pull (apart)’, and the various changes in argument structure that Thaayorre C&B verbs may undergo.