Workshop The Body in Language and Culture
Friday, October 25, 2013
14:00-17:30
Lipsius 228
The body is a central topic in culture and language, with all languages and cultures envisaging and
making metaphoric use of the body. Therefore, it is important to focus on the intricate relationship
between culture, language, and body, when studying language and culture. Across various cultures
internal body organs, such as the heart or liver, have been used as the locus of feelings, thinking,
knowing, etc. Although space has the same physical properties all around the world, the location of the
human body is encoded in different ways cross-linguistically. Space, direction, perception, the state of the
human body, etc., all involve metaphoric extensions of the body and its parts. Other cognitive capacities,
such as counting, are often based on the human body as well. In this workshop experts on language and
culture will focus on the relation between language and culture by zooming in on the body.
Abstracts
Body-language iconicity: Some explorations
into language ideologically informed notions of the speaking body
Vincent de Rooij
University of Amsterdam
In this talk, I will take up the challenge put forward by Woolard (2008) who asks whether and how we
should study the problem of why specific language forms become iconically linked to specific sociocultural meanings. As studies in language ideology have shown over and over again, thinking of linguistic
signs as either purely conventional or purely iconic is misguided. In the assignment of socio-cultural
meanings to linguistic forms, the body, or rather how the body speaks, plays a crucial role. Using data
from different societies, I will show how language ideologically informed ways of judging the speaking
body provide a template for the judging of linguistic elements.
Between people and places: The expression of landforms in Lokono
Konrad Rybka
University of Amsterdam
The idea that we conceptualize topographic features as a somewhat indeterminate category of objects is
a recurring theme in geographic modeling (cf. Cova & Goodchild 2002), ecological psychology (cf. Gibson
1979) as well as linguistics (cf. Lyons 1979). Nevertheless, little evidence has been brought forth to
support such assumptions about folk conceptualizations of landforms. In this talk, I look at the expression
of topography in Lokono (Arawakan) in order to explore what the linguistic features of such expressions
can tell us about the conceptualizations they encode. The terms used to express landforms belong to the
category of non-lexicalized phrases containing the set noun horhorho ‘land’ and a term that specifies its
spatial configuration (a body part term, a configurational term, a directional term or a combination
thereof); landform terms are therefore deeply embedded in spatial language. A comparison of spatial
expressions across different domains of Lokono lexicon reveals a cline from person-referring terms to
place-referring terms, with landforms representing a grammatically intermediate category.
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Verbs of perception in the context of ethnobiology in Maniq
Ewelina Wnuk
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Sensory information across languages and perceptual domains is encoded in various word classes. In
Maniq, an Austroasiatic language spoken by a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Thailand, the bulk of
perceptual distinctions is packaged into verbs. This talk highlights stative verbs of perception in Maniq,
investigating them in the context of ethnobiology. Maniq belongs to the Aslian group of languages of the
Malay Peninsula. Maniq verbs of perception are morphologically simple forms carrying highly specific
semantic information, e.g. cawãc ‘to be striped lengthwise’, kadiet ‘to be striped crosswise’, kamɛh ‘to
stink (of a millipede)’, bayel ‘to be light green and slightly red (of young leaves)’. Furthermore, some
domains – for instance, color – are host to verbal templates, an iconic device expressing fine-resolution
semantic contrasts, e.g. haʔ__ŋ as in haʔõŋ ‘to be brown/grey (of tubers)’, haʔuŋ 'to be yellow (of mud)'.
Apart from the rich and expressive sensory lexicon, Maniq possesses a set of verbal derivational
morphemes allowing for the encoding of additional semantic detail, e.g. the iterative affix lp- in lpɲup ‘to
feel soft in the mouth (repeatedly, when chewing)’ (from ɲup ‘to be soft’). The data illustrate that verbs in
Maniq are a highly functional word class, offering precision and expressiveness in reference to salient
perceptual qualities of the natural world and reflecting the detailed ethnobiological knowledge of the
Maniq.
(Dis)ease and illness among the Trio, a Cariban group of Suriname
Eithne B. Carlin
Leiden University
Medical anthropological approaches to interethnic health issues generally tend to ascribe differing health
attributions to ‘cultural’ differences, i.e. different worldviews of one biomedical reality. In this presentation
of the conception of (dis)ease and illness among the Trio Amerindians of Suriname, I look at illness
concepts and the linguistic strategies used to express notions of disease and illness and show, inter alia
by means of antonymic values and the issue of agency, how they differ in their conception from
biomedical etiological and causation definitions. I will show that Trio conceptions of illness are more
insightfully treated as ontological rather than cultural stances. For the Trio, health, (kure wehto ‘wellness’)
is understood, not as the absence of disease (injetun) or illness (ësenë wehto), but rather as the
presence of spiritual and communal harmony (sasame wehto ‘being at one with oneself and the
collective’). Illness, on the other hand, is associated with spirit or human intervention and/or anger in its
various guises, internal or external to the subject. I will present a preliminary taxonomy of Trio illness
terms showing how, although illness abounds and may be localized to specific parts of the body or not,
disease concepts are few and are expressed descriptively rather than as abstract monolexemic terms.
Body count: Numerals in Papuan languages of the Greater Awyu family
Lourens de Vries
VU University, Amsterdam
Numeral systems of the Greater Awyu family of Papuan languages are transparently based on body-parts
(De Vries, Wester & Van den Heuvel 2012, De Vries 2013, Van Enk & De Vries 1997). Extended body-part
tally systems that employ the fingers, parts of the arm and head are used by most languages of this family.
Body-part tally systems of this type are only found in parts of New Guinea and northern Australia and are
therefore of great interest for the typology of numeral systems. They are closed systems, with 23, 25 or 27 as
highest number in the languages of the Greater Awyu family (47 being the highest number found in a New
Guinea body-part tally system). They are also interesting because of the role of conventional gestures to
distinguish the primary body-part meaning from the secondary numeral meaning. The body-part tally systems
are used in combination with elementary numerals for 1 to 4 that are not derived from body-parts. One
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subgroup of the Greater Awyu family, the Awyu subgroup, uses a hands-and-feet system which they
borrowed from their Asmat and Marind neighbours. Such systems are also body-part based but differ
radically from body-part tally systems: they distinguish base and derived numbers, they are in principle openended and they are not restricted to New Guinea. The paper describes the cultural and typological contexts
of the numeral systems of the Greater Awyu family, pays attention to the interaction with borrowed
Indonesian numerals, to the syntactic integration of the body-part-numerals in phrases and clauses and to the
intriguing variation between speakers in the use of body-parts.
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