The Use of Body-part Terms as Locatives in Chalcatongo Mixtec

Abstract

The Use of Body-Part Terms as Locatives in Chalcatongo Mixtec Claudia Brugman University of California. Berkeley The expreslon of locational nations is achieved in a variety of ways in the languages of the world. European languages, [or the most part. express locations through a system ol cases and/or propositions (for instance. the box is in the room on the chair). Another widely~used mechanism is to use extended meanings of body-part terms in locating expres sions.1 English exhibits one kind of semantic extension in its use of body-part terms to refer to parts at noncorporeal objects. as in arm of a. chair or pants log. The Englisl‘. case. however. is somewhat uninteresting since the extended uses occur through transparent metaphor (based on perceived similarity and perceived close association of the objects. e.g. the leg or: a body and a pant: leg). Additionally, the extended English uses still name objects rather than locations. English examples like these occur sporadically rather than systematically. A more interesting and regular system of correlations between body-part tents and locating expressions occurs ir. Chalcatorgo Mixtec.2 in this language, body-part terms are used in at least [our distinguishable ways: I) to refer to parts oi the body; 2) to refer to sub- parts of other objects. based on perceived similarities to the corresponding subparts of the body: these uxes take the subpurl of the object as an object; 3) again to refer to subparts cl other objects. but taking the named subpart as a location rather than as an entity: these uses olter. exprcss not only the shape of the location but also the particular type of Iooativn relation (of. in v. on); 4) to refer to areas outside the boundaries oi the object. areas associ- ated with the sulipart named by the body-pnrt term. These was also often convey the type of locative relationship. As implied above, Mixlec body-part terms fill two sorts of roles in the language: the role of some qlexicalq mcrphemes (cf. pant: leg) and that of some morphemes which are arguably qgrammaticalq (cf. on the table). This fact suggests that the Mixtec 235

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