Abstract
Cross-linguistic strategies for mapping lexical and spatial relations from body partonym systems to external object meronymies (as in English ‘table leg,’ ‘mountain face’) have attracted substantial research and debate over the past three decades. Due to the systematic mappings, lexical productivity, and geometric complexities of body-based meronymies found in many Mesoamerican languages, the region has become focal for these discussions, prominently including contrastive accounts of the phenomenon in Zapotec and Tzeltal, leading researchers to question whether such systems should be explained as global metaphorical mappings from bodily source to target holonym or as vector mappings of shape and axis generated “algorithmically.” I propose a synthesis of these accounts in this paper by drawing on the species-specific cognitive affordances of human upright posture grounded in the reorganization of the anatomical planes, with a special emphasis on antisymmetrical relations that emerge between arm-leg and face-groin antinomies cross-culturally. Whereas Levinson argues that the internal geometry of objects “stripped of their bodily associations” (1994: 821) is sufficient to account for Tzeltal meronymy, making metaphorical explanations entirely unnecessary, I propose a more powerful, elegant explanation of Tzeltal meronymic mapping that affirms both the geometric-analytic and the global-metaphorical nature of Tzeltal meaning construal. I do this by demonstrating that the “algorithm” in question arises from the phenomenology of movement and correlative body memories — an experiential ground that generates a culturally selected pair of inverse contrastive paradigm sets with marked and unmarked membership emerging antithetically relative to the transverse anatomical plane. These relations are then selected diagrammatically for the classification of object orientations according to systematic geometric iconicities. Results not only serve to clarify the case in question but also point to the relatively untapped potential that upright posture holds for theorizing the emergence of human cognition, highlighting in the process the nature, origins and theoretical validity of markedness and double scope conceptual integration.
About the author
Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Ryerson University, Toronto, and an executive member of the Ryerson-York Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. Among other scholarly appointments, he serves as editor of the yearbook Semiotics and managing editor of The American Journal of Semiotics.
His research leverages anthropological, historical, and cognitive linguistics with a specialization in Ngwi languages (Tibeto-Burman) and an over-arching commitment to semiotic inquiry. His first two books define the Phula ethnolinguistic groups of China and Vietnam, identifying 18 new languages through mixed-methods fieldwork and analysis. His third book, The Semiotics of X: Chiasmus, Cognition and Extreme Body Memory (Bloomsbury Academic 2017), develops ongoing inquiry into language evolution and the chiasmus figure (X), as part of a federally funded (SSHRC-CRSH) project entitled “Steps to a Grammar of Embodied Symmetry.” Other recent project outcomes include the founding of a new lab in his home department (the Language, Culture, and Cognition Lab) and a Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica (2017).
Acknowledgements
This research project was initially made possible thanks to travel funding from the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, enabling me to participate in a seminar entitled “Meronymy across Languages: Lexicalization, Semantics, Morphosyntax,” hosted by the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico, 27–28 September 2013, under the direction of Jürgen Bohnemeyer (SUNY Buffalo). My appreciation goes to Jürgen and to other members of the seminar for opening up this line of inquiry to me and for offering helpful ideas on the first draft. Later development of this research relied in part on a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC-IDG #430-2015-01226), entitled “Steps to a Grammar of Embodied Symmetry,” for which I am also grateful. Final appreciation goes to two peer reviewers and to two of the editors of this special issue, Jordan Zlatev and Sune Vork Steffensen, for many key insights and corrections on the submission draft.
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