The grammar of body parts in Apurinã

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents an analysis of body-part terms in Apurinã (Arawak), examining their morphosyntax and semantics. This language shares the same nonpossessive marker of other Arawak languages, preserves a possession-marking pattern that is likely to reconstruct to earlier stages in the family, with a clear alienable–inalienable distinction, where, in the second, body-part terms play a prominent role, with marking patterns distinct from those of kinship terms. Besides its contribution to improving knowledge of Apurinã and Arawak, the results presented here provide important data on the role of frequency in defining (in)alienability, on how constructions where meronyms recur possessed may grammaticalize into compounds with classificatory functions, and on how the class of body-part terms extends to other concepts.