Grammaticalization of Body Part Terms in Mundabli

Abstract

The chapter describes the grammaticalization of body part terms in Mundabli. It has been shown for related languages that spatial postpositions are commonly derived historically from body part nouns, and this also seems to be the case for Mundabli. Mundabli body part terms also occur in a third category, 'postnominal body part construction'. In this construction they behave differently from both nouns and postpositions regarding both their semantics and their syntactic behaviour. The chapter describes postnominal body part constructions and shows what distinguishes body part terms in these from both nouns and postpositions. It concludes by suggesting that Postnominal body part constructions are an intermediate stage in the grammaticalization from nouns to spatial postpositions. Further research is necessary in order to find out what determines the preference of either a postnominal body-part construction or a possessive phrase which is embedded in a postpositional phrase. Keywords: body part terms; grammaticalization; Mundabli; postnominal body part; syntactic behavior