부산대학교 도서관

Cross-linguistic research on human body part lexicons has witnessed a major shift in focus from the decade of 70’s to the present time. Researchers in the past have looked for universals in body part terms and/or relationships governing those parts. In recent decades, they have begun to document language-specific diversity in body part nomenclature by adopting a broader view of language in which vision, action and experience influence language use practices. A decade ago, researchers at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics in Netherlands have designed specialized data-collection tools such as elicitation guide for body-part naming, and body-colouring task that allowed them to conduct a large-scale investigation involving several languages around the world including Punjabi. The MPI research has shown that body part naming is not guided strictly by universal principles alone, that not in all languages, body parts exhibit partonomic relations, and that instead, many culture-specific language-using practices influence the nomenclature as well as the relations among body parts. We describe here a study that made use of MPI tools to obtain naming data from ten native speakers of Telugu, one of the four major literary languages belonging to Dravidian group of languages. Major results pertaining to simplex versus complex terms for Telugu body parts,relations among some parts, and semantic extension of body-parts into figurative language use are discussed in this paper.