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

Table 11. BP Terms as Prepositions and Nouns in Colonial VZ Documents
Body Part Term Meaning Tokens as Preposition Tokens as Noun
lao 'to' 110 1 'face'
lani 'in' 14 0
lachinaa 'in the hands of' 14 0
cwe 'beside' 4 0
xana 'under' 1 0
rua 'edge' 0 34
que head 0 4
ni 'foot' 0 1
It is interesting to note that lao 8 occurs three times more often than any other body
part term in these texts. As I will discuss below, it also seems to have the broadest range
of meaning.
3.1 Examples of Body Part Nouns
There are many examples of the body part terms presented in Table 11 used as BP
nouns in the Colonial documents. Most of these examples are metaphorical uses of the
BP nouns, which is not surprising, given the limited content of the documents, which are
mostly wills. The definitions of the words in Cordova (1578a) confirm that these words
were also used as body parts in the Colonial period.
3.1.1 Lao 'face'
Cordova defines láo as "cara o rostro de animal” 'face [of a person] or face of an
animal' (Cordova 1578a, 72); however, all of the nominal uses we see in the documents
seem to be metaphorical, such as (24) below where lao refers to the face of a house.
8 Lao also occurs in the documents spelled as lo and loo. For the purposes of this paper, I
will treat these as the same word; however, it would be interesting to pursue the
possibility of a lexical difference between these in the future.
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