On the Borrowability of Body Parts

Abstract

Within recent years, quantitative cross-linguistic research has shown that body parts are one of the least borrowed semantic fields (Tadmor and Haspelmath, 2009a; 2009b; Tadmor, 2009). With body parts showing many similarities to closed classes, it is simple to assume there is little motivation for a language to borrow body part terms into its lexicon. Yet, despite its lower percentage of borrowings cross-linguistically, some languages employ much higher percentages of borrowings for naming the body. The motivations behind such borrowings across languages remain unexplored but can largely be explained by social factors. As Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and Thomason (2008) claim, social factors generally trump linguistic factors as predictors of contact-induced change. This study first discusses proposed inhibitions to lexical borrowing and then examines cases of body part loanwords from various languages showing how they fit into social patterns motivating such borrowings.