SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC EXTENSIONS OF COPALA TRIQUE BODY-PART NOUNS

Abstract

In Copala Trique, body-part nouns are extended to fill a wide variety of lexical and syntactic functions, both within the noun category and outside it. Within the noun category they are used to express parts of inanimate physical objects and also parts of abstract concepts. Body-part nouns are also commonly extended to prepositions; these body-part prepositions express not only spatial relations, but temporal, logical, and grammatical relations as well. Words that are derived from body-part nouns via a tone change function as adjectives and adverbs, and phrasal compounds that include body- part nouns function as conjunctions or as sentential adverbs that provide discourse cohesion. In this study I describe various extended uses of Copala Trique body-part nouns and suggest possible paths by which these uses may have developed. I believe that these paths consist of a series of semantic and/or syntactic shifts, each one plausible in itself, even though the most remote extensions may have little in common with the body part the word originally referred to. The shifts that these body-part nouns have undergone include both intra- and intercategory shifts. The intracategory shifts fall within the scope of metaphor because they involve the use of a term that belongs to one semantic field for something in a different field. These metaphors are, however, nearly all established in the lexicon and must be listed in any Trique dictionary as separate sense discriminations of the words. Intercategory (syntactic) shifts are accomplished by quite different mechanisms, though these often interact with metaphor. The two mechanisms I have observed in Copala Trique category shifts are derivation and what I call (for want of a better term) the optical-illusion mechanism. In derivation a category shift is accomplished by introducing some overt change in the shape of the word. In the optical-illusion mechanism, on the other hand, there is no overt difference in the form of the word that