Toren Dorsey, “Body Parts as Classifiers in South and Central American Languages”
Mentor: Kelsie Pattillo, Linguistics
In this project, we are researching body parts as sources for classifiers in Central and South American languages. A classifier is a grammatical feature in which languages use to group nouns. Depending on the language, it can be a word or part of word. Classifiers are found in languages across the world and are especially common among languages spoken in North, Central, and South America, Eastern Asia, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. Here, we focus on Central and South American languages to explore embodiment as possible a source for grammatical structures in languages. Embodiment is the theory that humans conceptualize the external world through their bodies, such as in English bottle necks, hands of a clock, and face of a clock. Embodiment appears in grammatical structures like tense markers and prepositions in many languages. Here, we aim to explore the relationship between how we conceptualize the world with our bodies and resources languages use to develop classifier systems. By using a database of body-based classifiers found in a sample of Central and South American languages we hope to show that relationship.
Great presentation, Toren! You have a very nice spoken pace and visuals throughout the slides. The use of video also augments your presentation. It’s remarkable how much you have accomplished in just two months of working on this project.
The work that you’ve been doing throughout this project is very clear throughout the presentation. Some areas that you could include in future presentations could include which languages you have considered (for example, how many languages have you collected data from and which language families do they represent?) and a brief description of any patterns that you see emerging in the data (or what you hope to find or look for once the database is more sizeable).
Well done! Celebrate this accomplishment.
Nice project, Toren!
Well done with supervising Toren for this project, Kelsie!
Thank you for sharing this. It taught me about ideas that I had never thought of before and now I won’t be able to “unsee” the idea of classifiers. I especially appreciate your sharing the visual of the spreadsheet that organizes the data you are working with.
Great presentation Toren!