Embodiment in Zande

Abstract

A number of body part terms of Zande have a wide range of metaphorical meanings. Most of these are purely lexical, only a few result from grammaticalization. Specific subsets of usages are linked to restricted sets of body part terms. Specific types of usages are carried out by restricted sets of bodypart terms. Purely lexical metaphors of the denotations for ‘heart’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’, are used for the expression of emotions, the term for ‘eye’ being by far the most frequent. Compound of the terms for ‘side’ and ‘belly’ plus a numeral indicate the number of sides or corners respectively that designate geometrical shapes such as rectangles and cuboids. Animal bodies or their body parts are found in two compounds used as allegoric designations for certain architectural shapes. Some of the uses of the term for ‘hand’, be are quite exceptional among the languages of the world. While it is not uncommon to express possession of an item as holding it in the hand, the term be has acquired additional specific functions in Zande by further grammaticalization. The first one is that of marking origin from a powerful, often dangerous animate source, and the second is the marking of the (usually negative) effect of an action or from an inanimate object. The use of body part terms to denote the five spatial concepts of Heine’s scale is also important. Eight body part terms are used with this function, next to five terms that have landmarks as their conceptual sources. This means that each landmark based term is used for only one specific concept, and – in addition – all concepts, with the exception of DOWN, are expressed by several body part terms, of which bangiri ‘eye’ can even express three concepts, Four body part terms are extremely frequent: bangiri, 'eye' having the widest range of spatial notions (‘in the middle’, ‘in front’, ‘on top’), ri 'head' gi 'back' and sa 'tail'. Another four are less frequent: rumburu 'buttocks', ngba 'mouth', ngbadu 'in' and vuru 'in'. Graph 2 shows the distribution of highly frequent and not frequent terms with respect to the different spatial concepts. The former are represented in large-size bold letters, the latter in small-size narrow letters. Body part terms are written in TNR-italics, landmark terms in ARIAL regular.