The expression of texture in P’urhepecha

Abstract

Alongside taste and smell, touch has long been considered one of the ‘lower’ senses in much of western thought (Classen 1997). However, more recent research indicates that this ranking is not absolute, but that the cultural importance of the senses and their role in constructing worldview is relative, and thus variable (San Roque et al. 2015). Winter (2019: 191) also remarks that touch is high in semantic complexity because it is a frequent source domain in cross-modal language use, for instance, rough voice. Nevertheless, the language of touch has largely been ignored in linguistic description (cf. Essegbey 2013). This paper specifically investigates the language of texture in P’urhepecha, an isolate spoken in western Mexico, focusing on terms obtained by employing the “texture booklet” (Majid et al. 2007). Responses revealed two main morphosyntactic strategies: (i) terms formed from a root that expresses a texture, further subdivided into adjectival and verbal forms, and (ii) a variety of comparison constructions that can be broadly translated by ‘like’ in English. Ten roots were employed overall, but three of them dominated: ch’era- ‘rough’, sanu- (and its variant sunu-) ‘woolly’, and pitsï- (and its variant pichi-) ‘smooth’. These describe all ten of the stimulus materials, whereas the minor, less frequent roots, had narrower reference. While further investigation is needed to gain a better understanding of this lexical domain, our preliminary study of texture terms in P’urhepecha adds to the very few sources that have investigated this area of linguistic inquiry, and also deepens our knowledge of the complex morphology and contact-induced features of the language (cf. Chamoreau 2012).