Word formation potential of words relating to upper body in Danish

Abstract

Somatisms, or names of human body parts, are the oldest and most important components of the linguistic “picture of the world” of any nation. People have always had associations with something directly related to them and that they are familiar with — parts of the body. The most frequently used somatisms related to the upper body (head) were chosen as material for this study: hoved ‘head’, næse ‘nose’, mund ‘mouth’, nakke ‘back of the head’, hals ‘neck’, pande ‘forehead’, øje ‘eye’, øre ‘ear’. Since isolated somatisms act as independent units only in some specific contexts, the study also included compound words with these somatism-components as the second component. The analysis of meanings of the most frequent words belonging to the lexicalsemantic group “Upper part of the human body” reveals a rather mixed picture. On the one hand, these units in their literal sense make up parts of many compound words, which allows us to identify the main word-formation patterns for this sphere. On the other hand, somatisms in their figurative meanings are also actively used within compound nouns. Pseudoparticiples represent a separate group that can be metaphorised and in this case are used to characterize a person, together with evaluative nouns containing similar second components. In some cases, pseudoparticiples serve as parallels to evaluative nouns with a somatism as the second component. In the sphere of evaluative nouns, there is a weakening of the semantics of words used as second components, which clearly indicates that these units are on their way to become affixes. The word-formation potential of the somatisms under study is extremely wide and is determined by the importance of body parts in the sensory cognition of the world and in the subject-practical activity of man, which determines the number and regularity of the units derived from them.