The Categorial Status of Body Part Prepositions in Valley Zapotec ...

. Bèe'ecw zòob ni'ih me'es. (TMZ)
dog NEU.sit under table.
'The dog is sitting under the table.'
In Section 2 I have presented a variety of syntactic and semantic tests, showing
repeatedly that BP and non-BP PPs pattern together in the syntax, while BP PPs do not
function like NPs either syntactically or semantically. BP terms in locative expressions
behave semantically as prepositions, referring to the relationship between the figure and
the ground, and need not refer to a location on the ground. Furthermore, the path of
syntactic and semantic change that would be necessary to develop this system can be
accounted for using already existing and well established types of change such as
metaphor and metonymic extension. Whatever the exact path of historical development,
these changes must have happened very early, since the use of BP prepositions seems to
be reconstructable for Proto-Zapotecan.
3.0 Valley Zapotec Colonial Documents
Pamela Munro, Kevin Terraciano (History, UCLA), Lisa Sousa (History,
Occidental College) and graduate students at UCLA including John Foreman, Christina
Esposita, Olivia Martínez, and me, among others, have been involved in a long term
project of translating and analyzing Zapotec language texts from the Spanish Colonial
period in Mexico, ranging in date from 1565 to 1753. These documents were written in
Zapotec by native speakers using Roman letters to approximate the complicated
phonological system. The inaccuracy of this system and doubts about the meaning of
these spellings make many types of phonological analysis nearly impossible, but does
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