Publications

Publication details [#51079]

Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. The selective advantage of body-part terms. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (10) : 2130–2136.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

body part terminology | common ground | communicative success | social context | universalism

Place, Publisher

Elsevier

Journal WWW

www.sciencedirect.com/web-editions

Annotation

This study argues that falling back on stable common ground to maximize the odds of successful communication explains the universal linguistic strategy of the selective advantage of body-part terms, notwithstanding language-specific variation due to different socio-cultural contexts.