Zapotec Body-Part Locatives: Prototypes and Metaphoric Extensions

MacLaury, Robert E.

doi:10.1086/466110

Cited by 68 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…((That's the truth)) Some of these examples illustrate the meronyms composed of body-part locative constructions that Zapotec is known for (Maclaury 1989;Pérez-Báez 2011) and Meso-American languages more generally (Bohnemeyer 2011;Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark 1986;Freidrich 1969;Stross 1976). Meronymy can be seen in example (4) ro'o farmásya 'lit: mouth pharmacy' picking out the side of the building with the door and example (10) liññi pasajéero 'lit: stomach bus' for 'inside the bus'.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 96%

Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Sicoli

2016

Open Linguistics

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Abstract:People make reference to places in the variable formulations afforded by their languages and to multiple ends that in addition to picking out a referent, simultaneously build conceptual common ground about seen and unseen landscapes, including moral stances about the social geography. This paper examines the different ways that Lachixío Zapotec speakers of Oaxaca, Mexico, formulate and interpret place references in the dialogic narratives of their conversations. I examine sequences of interaction within stories that emerged in conversations as joint social actions. These sequences include both speakers' place formulations and addressees' responses that publically display their uptake and stances toward the references. I describe resources of the Lachixío Zapotec language for referencing place and show how place references are entangled with person references, references to historical events, and participants' moral stances toward such references. Through examining references to locations within sequences of conversational story telling we gather some evidence for how conceptual common ground and moral value is developed through the step-wise progression of turn-taking and how stances about places come to be culturally shared or contested between interlocutors dialogically.

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Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 96%

Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Sicoli

2016

Open Linguistics

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“…A natural strategy is to base the deϐinitions on parts of the object, or -by metaphorical projection -on parts of the human body (MacLaury 1989;Langacker 2002). This strategy is evident in complex prepositional locutions: by the side of the river; at the top of the stairs; in the back of the room.…”

Section: The Place Of Preposiɵ Onsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on the Functional Characterization of Spatial Prepositions

Langacker¹

2009

Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies

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Abstract. In his research on spatial prepositions, Vandeloise raised the basic question of whether they are really spatial in nature. He clearly established the importance -if not the predominance -of functional considerations. In the case of in, for example, the container function is at least as important as spatial inclusion; likewise, the support function is central to the meaning of on. Accepting the validity of this insight leaves certain issues unresolved, such as the relative weight of spatial and functional factors and how they relate to one another. And more speciϐically, if the functions in question are really fundamental, why is the containing or supporting element expressed grammatically as the preposition's object (in contrast to verbs like contain and support, which choose it as their subject)? These matters are addressed in the context of a broader examination of grammar viewed as a product and instrument of embodied cognition and thus reϐlective of how we apprehend and interact with the world.

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“…In Mesoamerican languages, meronyms are often body part terms, but may also refer to geometrical features of objects and to spatial regions defined with respect to such features. The particulars of meronymy in various Mesoamerican languages have been described for the Mayan languages Mopan (Danziger, 1996), Tseltal (Stross, 1976;Levinson, 1994) and Yucatec (Goldap, 1992;Bohnemeyer and Stolz, 2006), Mixtec and Trique belonging to the Mixtecan branch of the Otomanguean language family (Brugman, 1983;Brugman and Macaulay, 1986;Hollenbach, 1987Hollenbach, , 1988, various Zapotec varieties (MacLaury, 1989;Lillehaugen, 2006;Pérez Báez, in press), as well as Cora (Casad, 1982), Totonac (Levy, 1999(Levy, , 2006 and Tarascan (Friedrich, 1969(Friedrich, , 1970(Friedrich, , 1971. While meronyms are certainly not unique to Mesoamerican languages, they are used within the Mesoamerican sprachbund in a particularly productive way, as speakers may assign body part terms to a wide variety of objects and their parts, even in the case of objects that might have been previously unknown to them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While meronyms are certainly not unique to Mesoamerican languages, they are used within the Mesoamerican sprachbund in a particularly productive way, as speakers may assign body part terms to a wide variety of objects and their parts, even in the case of objects that might have been previously unknown to them. This line of investigation can inform the theory of domain mapping -how speakers of a given language map objects from the source domain, such as the human, animal or plant body onto objects of the target domain, in this case inanimate objects (Brugman, 1983;MacLaury, 1989;Levinson, 1994). Also, meronyms constitute an important component of spatial descriptions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%