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

These documents have proved to be a rich source of data for the use of body part
terms both as nouns and as prepositions. I collected all the examples of body part terms
from our analyzed texts and present and analyze them here.
Given the nature of the material, I can use the documents only to provide positive
evidence. That is to say, just because we see no example of the use of a particular word
in these fifteen documents does not mean the word was not being used at that time.
Likewise, the absence of the use of a body part term used in a locational construction
does not mean that it was not used that way at that time. And of course, we have no
speakers who could judge potential sentences as ungrammatical. Nevertheless, the type
of information that the positive data provides is interesting, and it adds another dimension
to the discussion of the categorial status of the body part terms and possible paths of
semantic and syntactic change.
Of the twelve different body part terms presented in Table 3, we see examples of
seven of these in the Colonial documents. Additionally, we see a complex body part term
that is used in sentences dealing with possession, lachinaa 'in the hand of.' These eight
words are presented below in Table 11, which shows the total number of uses of each of
these terms as prepositions and as nouns.
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