Abstract
The Dene speak a polysynthetic family of languages spread over a discontinuous territory in western North America. Geographically dispersed and culturally diverse, the Dene languages are similar in their grammatical systems and basic root inventories. The terms for ‘face’ in Dene languages reflect a remarkable blend of conservatism of root forms and variation in lexical structure that is a characteristic trait of this family. Lexical units involving the face form diachronic patterns of polysemic extension originating in the denotation of body parts in humans and other animals and grammaticalizing into abstract noun classifiers. The lexical structures terms of face enter into, and of how these relate semantically to the concepts they encode, evidence shared tendencies in cultural conceptualization. This contribution will argue that the complexity and productivity of word-formation processes in these languages evidence a latent cultural and cognitive commonality.
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