Based on the firsthand data from Murui, a Witotoan language spoken in the Northwest Amazon, the study demonstrates how the body part terms ‘back’, ‘face’, ‘mouth, and ‘body’ grammaticalized into the domains covering spatial orientation, time, comparison, counting, and the reflexive. Murui body part nouns did not grammaticalize in isolation; to become grammatical markers, they were obligatorily followed by case marking. This allowed those nouns to preserve the original semantics of the case suffixes, and then to extend their semantics into other domains. For instance, the noun ‘back, spine’, followed by the locative, became a postposition meaning ‘above, on top’, and later also ‘over’, a marker used in comparative constructions and counting. In the contexts in which this process took place, ‘back’ lost its semantic content and many of its original morphosyntactic characteristics.
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Cited by (22)
Cited by 22 other publications
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2022. Tariana body parts in North Arawak perspective. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 215 ff.
Bowers, Jack
2022. Pathways and patterns of metaphor and metonymy in Mixtepec-Mixtec body-part terms. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 91 ff.
Coler, Matt, Bertie Kaal & Edwin Banegas-Flores
2022. The use ofnayra‘eye’ in Muylaq’ Aymara. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 79 ff.
Cúneo, Paola & Cristina Messineo
2022. Body parts in Toba. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 126 ff.
Danielsen, Swintha & Lena Terhart
2022. Body-part terms in Baure and Paunaka. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 238 ff.
2022. The grammar of body-part expressions in Iskonawa. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 425 ff.
Zariquiey, Roberto & Pilar M. Valenzuela
2022. Body-part nouns, prefixation, incorporation, and compounding in Panoan and Takanan. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 441 ff.
Roberto Zariquiey & Pilar M. Valenzuela
2022. The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions,
Zariquiey, Roberto & Pilar M. Valenzuela
2022. Introduction. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. 1 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Abbreviations. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. xi ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Copyright Page. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Figures. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. vii ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Tables. In The Grammar of Body-Part Expressions, ► pp. ix ff.
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