Partonomy

A key question in categorisation is to what extent people categorise in the same way, or differently. This paper examines categorisation of the body in Punjabi, an Indo-European language spoken in Pakistan and India. First, an inventory of body part terms is presented, illustrating how Punjabi speakers segment and categorise the body. There are some noteworthy terms in the inventory, which illustrate categories in Punjabi that are unusual when compared to other languages presented in this volume. Second, Punjabi speakers’ conceptualisation of the relationship between body parts is explored. While some body part terms are viewed as being partonomically related, others are viewed as being in a locative relationship. It is suggested that there may be key ways in which languages differ in both the categorisation of the body into parts, and in how these parts are related to one another.

This PhD dissertation offers an updated version of the Old Babylonian lexical list Ugumu, a source that was used as a learning and teaching device for the training in cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamian scribes. This work includes the new Ugu-mu texts, both monolingual (Sumerian) and bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian), catalogued from 1967 on, when the first edition of the list was published. Besides, the unpublished texts of the list from the Schøyen collection (Oslo and London) are edited and analysed as well.

Since Ugu-mu lists anatomical and body-related terms, a significative part of this dissertation has focused on Sumerian and Akkadian partonomic categories, as well as in the semantic analysis of the vocabulary in Ugu-mu, its use in context, and the ideas, concepts and practices linked to the human body within the corpus of Mesopotamian cuneiform texts.

The domain of the human body is an ideal focus for semantic typology, since the body is a physical universal and all languages have terms referring to its parts. Previous research on body part terms has depended on secondary sources (e.g. dictionaries), and has lacked sufficient detail or clarity for a thorough understanding of these terms’ semantics. The present special issue is the outcome of a collaborative project aimed at improving approaches to investigating the semantics of body part terms, by developing materials to elicit information that provides for cross-linguistic comparison. The articles in this volume are original fieldwork-based descriptions of terminology for parts of the body in ten languages. Also included are an elicitation guide and experimental protocol used in gathering data. The contributions provide inventories of body part terms in each language, with analysis of both intensional and extensional aspects of meaning, differences in morphological complexity, semantic relations among terms, and discussion of partonomic structure within the domain.

hebammenbezeichnungen für die teile des weiblichen geschlechtsorgans bei der überprüfung der jungfräulichkeit im Frankreich des 16. jahrhunderts

(course material, spring course 2014)

For similar partonymic sets in ancient and medieval Chinese texts, see
"On the Partonymy of Female Genitals in Chinese Manuscripts on Sexual Body Techniques", https://www.academia.edu/25569423/

Cross-linguistic strategies for mapping lexical and spatial relations from body partonym systems to external object meronymies (as in English 'table leg', 'mountain face') have attracted substantial research and debate over the past three decades. Due to the systematic mappings, lexical productivity and geometric complexities of body-based meronymies found in many Mesoamerican languages, the region has become focal for these discussions, prominently including contrastive accounts of the phenomenon in Zapotec and Tzeltal, leading researchers to question whether such systems should be explained as global metaphorical mappings from bodily source to target holonym or as vector mappings of shape and axis generated " algorithmically ". I propose a synthesis of these accounts in this paper by drawing on the species-specific cognitive affordances of human upright posture grounded in the reorganization of the anatomical planes, with a special emphasis on antisymmetrical relations that emerge between arm-leg and face-groin antinomies cross-culturally. Whereas Levinson argues that the internal geometry of objects " stripped of their bodily associations " (1994: 821) is sufficient to account for Tzeltal meronymy, making metaphorical explanations entirely unnecessary, I propose a more powerful, elegant explanation of Tzeltal meronymic mapping that affirms both the geometric-analytic and the global-metaphorical nature of Tzeltal meaning construal. I do this by demonstrating that the " algorithm " in question arises from the phenomenology of movement and correlative body memories—an experiential ground which generates a culturally selected pair of inverse contrastive paradigm sets with marked and unmarked membership emerging antithetically relative to the transverse anatomical plane. These relations are then selected diagrammatically for the classification of object orientations according to systematic geometric iconicities. Results not only serve to clarify the case in question but also point to the relatively untapped potential that upright posture holds for theorizing the emergence of human cognition, highlighting in the process the nature, origins and theoretical validity of markedness and double scope conceptual integration.

This article takes up the question of how the “partonomy-taxonomy” issue can be formulated within Langacker's theory of cognitive grammar. The discussion concentrates on a comparison of taxonomic hierarchies with one particular model of the part whole relationship – the so called member-collection model. When analysed in terms of class-inclusion, complex collections like an army are analogous to type hierarchies. However, when analysed in terms of meaning, the relation characterizing collections with hierarchical organization is diametrically different from the relationship between a type and a subtype. Providing arguments for close affinity between the part-whole structure of collections and objects, as opposed to the taxonomic relation of class inclusion, this study is in line with the results of developmental and experimental studies conducted by Markman and Seibert (1976) and Markman et al. (1980). At the same time, however, it goes against the folk model of the category and its members, which was argued for by Kövecses and Radden ((1998).

Human body as a universal possession of human beings constitutes an interesting domain where questions regarding semantic categorisations might be sought crosslinguistically. In the following, we will attempt to describe the terms used to refer to the body in Hawrami, an Iranian language spoken in Paveh, a small township in the western province of Kermanshah near Iraqi borders. Due to the scarcity of written material, the inventory of 202 terms referring to external and internal body parts were obtained through a field work, which took a long time, and techniques, such as the “colouring task”, observation and recording the terms as used in ordinary conversations and informal interviews with native speakers. The semantic properties of the terms and the way they are related in a partonymy or locative relationship were also investigated. As far as universals of body part terms are concerned, while conforming to ‘depth principle’ concerning the number of levels each partonomy may consis...