Limb Term Naming Patterns in South American Languages

Abstract:Although there is widespread agreement that metaphor and metonymy play an important part in naming body parts crosslinguistically, many of the accepted claims regarding body part naming strategies in the world's languages come from unbalanced language samples; the most frequently referenced studies include few, if any, indigenous languages from South America. Focusing on terms for the upper and lower limbs, this article reexamines some crosslinguistic tendencies proposed by David P. Wilkins and Elaine S. Andersen with data from twenty-six language families and isolates spoken across South America; my analysis shows differences in the distribution and examples of the proposed patterns.