Tana Wu 小塔
A comparative study of body part terms in Mongolian and Manchu
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
As an important branch of language typology, lexical typology studies the similarities and differences of lexical systems among languages and aims to analyze the cross-linguistic rules behind lexicalization patterns, semantic segmentation and lexicon-grammar interface. As for such body part terms expressing the notions of ‘eyes’, ‘ears’, ‘nose’, ‘mouth’ and ‘tongue’ in Mongolian, a number of studies have been done so far. However, there is no systematic comparative study conducted between Mongolian and Manchu in this respect. The previous studies focus on either the metaphorical and metonymic usages of body part terms in Mongolian, etymological and historical comparative studies within such Mongolian dialects as Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk, or their uses in the field of cultural anthropology, relating to folklore, taboos and proverbs.
In this study, we focus on a comparison of body part terms between Mongolian and Manchu in the following areas: 1) word-formation including both derivation and compound words; 2) semantic expansion, metaphorical usages, and grammaticalization; 3) cultural cognitive differences. It is concluded that there are structural similarities between the two languages in terms of derivation. However, Mongolian body part terms are more abstract in their meanings, while Manchu is more concrete emphasizing spacial relationships and kinship. Manchu shows more Shaman elements than Mongolian.
Several suggestions are given regarding the prospect of this research topic. Firstly, attention should be given to the study of dialectal differences of these body part terms among Khalkha Mongolian and other Inner Mongolian dialects in terms of their pronunciations and usages. Efforts must be paid to work out a visualized semantic network of Mongolian body part terms. Lastly, cross-disciplinary works in the field of neurolinguistics should be attached great importance to examine Mongolian native speakers’ cognitive processing of the body part terms.