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

4.5 Conclusions
There is no evidence from my data that the SLQZ learning children acquire
prepositions in a different order than children acquiring other languages. Furthermore,
there is no evidence that the fact that these prepositions are homophonous with body part
words affects their acquisition at all. The fact that the youngest child, Vanesa 1;6, had
acquired làa'iny 'in', but not làa'iny 'stomach' seems to be the strongest evidence in
support of a grammatical dissociation between the words, and the other dissociations also
offer support of a categorial difference between the BP nouns and locatives.
Similar patterns of dissociation were also found in Jensen de López's data (1999 and
2002).
If the child acquires 'in' before 'stomach', then it does not make sense to argue that
the child's use of 'in' is a metaphorical extension of 'stomach'. This, of course, has
implications for adult grammar as well: if children acquire these lexical items separately
and thus do not derive the location sense of the BP term from the BP noun, it seems
unlikely that adults do.
6.0 Conclusions
In this thesis I argued that the BP terms used in locative expressions should be
classified as prepositions. I presented syntactic evidence from modern VZ languages
supporting this and data from Colonial VZ documents which are consistent with the
prepositional analysis and show that this distinction has been around for at least 200
years. The data from child acquisition of Zapotec further supports the categorial
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