Date of Award

5-1-2014

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Garry W. Davis

Committee Members

Edith A. Moravcsik, Nicholas Fleisher, Sandra L. Pucci, Fred Eckman

Keywords

Body Parts, Cross-Linguistic, Historical Linguistics, Human Limbs, Metonymy, Typology

Abstract

This dissertation is a cross-linguistic lexical study of metonymic change in human limb nomenclature. The data analyzed for this study make up both synchronic and diachronic databases. The synchronic data come from a sample of 153 non-Indo-European languages from 66 language families and are balanced for genetic and areal influence. The diachronic data are made up of a large collection of Indo-European etymologies. By comparing the metonymic patterns found in the Indo-European historical data with the synchronic cross-linguistic data, this dissertation explores to what extent the patterns of change found in Indo-European are cross-linguistic tendencies.

In addition to showing how etymological data from one language family can help identify cross-linguistic tendencies, this dissertation also supports the claim that semantic change is regular, predictable and unidirectional. This serves as a framework for identifying cross-linguistic lexical tendencies. Along with its contributions to the theoretical discussion of regularity in lexical change, this dissertation proposes three universal tendencies and a substantial amount of lexical data that is useful for future cross-linguistic studies.

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