Body part terms in Kammu

This article is a study of words for body parts in the Mon-Khmer language Kammu. It contains one descriptive part, presenting some 200 thematically ordered entries of words related to the body, with belonging elucidation and illustrations. In a more theoretical and comparative part, the data are used to relate Kammu to a wider debate concerning the semantic domain of body parts. Cross-linguistic studies from the late 1970’s proposed several universals for the hierarchical structure of this semantic domain. These studies have since been criticized for being far too narrow, neglecting the variety of more or less hierarchical relationships that may hold between body parts in a language. Lately, comprehensive cross-linguistic studies has both corroborated this criticism and developed elicitation methods for accessing different relationships and structures in this semantic domain. The results show that Kammu follows most of the proposed universals, save for a few noteworthy exceptions. There are, however, also cases where different elicitation methods reveal slightly different hierarchical structures – a fact which supports many of the ideas put forward in recent studies.