Patterns of semantic variation differ across body parts: evidence from the Japonic languages

2.1.1 Languages and speakers

Data for the body part naming task was collected from 66 speakers in six language areas (two Japanese and four Ryukyuan) during four fieldtrips conducted between 2017 and 2019. For all areas, data was collected from multiple localities, i.e., in multiple dialects. Apart from Tokyo Japanese, which serves as the de facto national standard, there is no standardised variety of Tohoku Japanese or the Ryukyuan languages (Heinrich et al. 2015). As such, we will refer to Tokyo Japanese as “Standard Japanese”, and use the term “language area” for the other five varieties for the remainder of this paper, e.g., the Amami language area. Given the endangered status of Ryukyuan, the data was collected from elderly native speakers, some of whom had little experience in performing standardised linguistic elicitation tasks, so some interview sessions were conducted with multiple speakers simultaneously. To minimise potential confounds, all analyses were conducted on sessions rather than speakers—see also Section 2.1.3. Table 1 shows information about the number of speakers and sessions per language area.

2.1.2 Materials and procedure

Data was collected using 52 line drawings of the human body: 39 showed the full human body from the front and back, and 13 depicted the head and face (see Figure 1). In each drawing, a red dot was placed somewhere on the body, and participants had to say where the dot was located. The drawings were presented in three blocks: a first block of 39 drawings of the full body, a second block of 10 drawings of the head with the mouth closed, and a third block of three drawings of the head with the mouth opened. The presentation order of the blocks was kept constant across speakers, but stimuli were presented in two fixed orders—one the reverse of the other—within each block, which was randomised across speakers. This stimulus set was newly created for this project, but was inspired by earlier stimuli (Majid et al. 2010). Figure 1 consolidates the separate drawings into a single image, with stimulus order indicated.

Figure 1:

Stimuli used in the naming task. In the elicitation task, only one dot appeared in each figure, and participants had to identify where the dot was located.

Speakers saw the drawings one by one on a tablet, i.e., they saw one red dot at a time, and were asked to name the body part marked by the red dot, by answering the question “What is the place of the red dot called?”. Speakers could give responses of any length. All sessions were minimally audio-recorded, and sometimes video-recorded for later transcription. Speakers gave informed consent before participating. Data collection was approved by the Ethics Assessment Committee of the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University.

2.1.3 Coding

We extracted, per session, the full response(s) for each stimulus, which could include multiple responses. In sessions with multiple speakers, we coded all unique responses, i.e., if two speakers named the stimulus differently, we coded both responses. Next, we coded main response(s) using the following coding scheme: main responses were monolexemic responses (e.g., English arm) and polylexemic responses that are conventionalised and untransparent (e.g., English forearm). Locatives such as left/right, front/back, upper/lower were excluded when they were compositional and transparent (e.g., the meaning of English upper arm can be derived from the elements upper and arm, so only arm was coded). If the meaning of combined elements referred to a different body part which could not be reduced to a single element (e.g., English between the eyes), the full response was coded. There were not many such cases in the Japonic data: two in Standard Japanese and one in the Amami language area, and none in the other four language areas.

2.2.1 Regional and individual variation of body part vocabulary in Japonic

The first aim of the current study was to establish the variation in body part lexicons of related languages. To assess this, we ask whether body part vocabulary is more similar for languages that are more closely related. We investigated variation by comparing individual sessions to each other, hypothesising that sessions from the same language area would be more similar than sessions from another language area.

We created a session-by-stimulus matrix in which we coded the main responses for cognacy—i.e., whether the main responses have a common etymological origin. For example, stimulus 22 (‘belly’), received the monolexemic responses o-naka (Standard Japanese), hara (Tohoku) and wata ∼ bata (Ryukyuan). These were coded as belly-A, belly-B and belly-C, respectively because none of these are cognate. For polylexemic responses, we coded the cognacy of individual elements. As the focus of the current study is body part vocabulary, only content elements were coded for cognacy, and so case marking particles and the copula were excluded in the coding. So, for example, the elements in the Standard Japanese response aɕi=no oja.jubi [leg=GEN parent.digit] to stimulus 29 (‘big toe, front’) were coded as leg-A, parent-A and digit-A, whereas the elements in the Yaeyama response paɴ=nu bu:.jubi [leg=GEN large.digit] were coded as leg-B, large-A and digit-A. In cases where there were multiple, (partially) overlapping responses, each element was only counted once.

Next, we used the session-by-stimulus matrix in a series of pairwise comparisons to assess the similarity between sessions. The analysis was conducted in GABMAP (Nerbonne et al. 2011), an online tool for dialectometry. For each pair of sessions, cognacy overlap was calculated using the Jaccard Index (J; Jaccard 1901, 1912) for each stimulus separately. Thereafter, the mean cognacy overlap over all stimuli was taken as a general measure of similarity between sessions. Doing this for all sessions creates a session-by-session similarity matrix that we analysed with multidimensional scaling, as well as cluster analysis using Ward’s method (Ward 1963), both in base R (cmdscale and hclust functions, R Core Team 2020).

Figure 2 shows the results of the multidimensional scaling analysis, and reveals Tohoku and Standard Japanese sessions were much closer to each other than the Ryukyuan sessions—average similarity between the mainland Japanese sessions was M _J  = 0.65 (SD = 0.09), whereas average similarity between the Ryukyuan sessions was M _J  = 0.48 (SD = 0.10). The Amami sessions showed a wide spread, suggesting more variation in that language area in particular. Some Amami sessions showed similarities to both the Japanese mainland and others to Ryukyuan sessions. Several Yaeyama sessions also fell in between the Northern and Southern Ryukyuan sessions. Miyako sessions appeared to be the most divergent.

Figure 2:

Multidimensional scaling analysis of body part naming data, left. Each symbol represents a session. Plotting the second dimension on the x-axis and the first dimension on the y-axis roughly recreates the geographic layout of the language area, shown bottom right.

A cluster analysis (Figure 3) of the same data recapitulated the results of the multidimensional scaling for the most part. Mainland sessions (Japanese and Tohoku) were grouped together and most Ryukyuan sessions (Amami, Okinawa, Miyako and Yaeyama) grouped together, roughly corresponding to the results of the multidimensional scaling analysis (Figure 2). In addition, the cluster analysis shed further light on distinctions within subgroups. Within the mainland cluster, all Standard Japanese and Tohoku sessions were grouped separately and within the Tohoku cluster, two subgroups were distinguished that correspond largely to the traditional division between Nambu dialects (Hachinohe) and Tsugaru dialects (Aomori and Hirosaki). Consistent with the multidimensional scaling analysis, four Amami sessions grouped together with the mainland clusters. Closer inspection revealed these speakers to be some of the youngest in the sample, and they used several Standard Japanese terms not generally used in the Ryukyuan languages (e.g., çiza for ‘knee’ rather than tsubusɨ, and kakato for ‘heel’ rather than ado). Within Ryukyuan, there was a large cluster of sessions from the Northern Ryukyuan area, split into an Amami subgroup and a distinct Okinawa subgroup. Finally, there was a large cluster of only Southern Ryukyuan sessions, split into a subgroup of all Miyako sessions plus a single Yaeyama session, and another subgroup of the remaining Yaeyama sessions.

Figure 3:

Cluster analysis of body part naming data by session recapitulates language areas.

Overall, the multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses show body part naming data largely reflect the geographical differences between the Japonic languages (see e.g., Pellard 2015; Shibatani 1990), with individual sessions mirroring larger patterns of variation. In addition, the Japanese mainland varieties resembled each other more than the Ryukyuan varieties (see also e.g., Huisman et al. 2019). We return to the high variability of Ryukyuan in the General Discussion.

2.2.2 Semantic distinctions in parts of the face and parts of the body

We next examined the lexicon for parts of the face and parts of the body for all Japonic languages as a whole. To do this, for each language area, we create a stimulus-by-cognate frequency matrix where, for each stimulus, we coded how often per session a stimulus was described by each cognate term in the naming task. We calculated, for each pair of stimuli, the cosine similarity based on naming responses—in R; cosine function in the lsa package (Wild 2015). Doing this for all stimulus pairs creates a stimulus-by-stimulus similarity matrix that encodes, for each language area, the body part categories and the relationship between them. To generate an overall frame of reference that covers the common structure of the body part lexicon across the Japonic language family as a whole, we averaged the six stimulus-by-stimulus similarity matrices to create a single overall matrix, on which we performed cluster analysis using Ward’s method in base R (hclust function). While this analysis does not provide language-specific body partonomies, it does provide a common frame of reference by which we can compare across languages. The cluster analyses can be taken to reveal a covert conceptual structure common to the Japonic languages considered here (cf. Majid et al. 2008).

We conducted separate cluster analyses for the face and the body. These analyses showed that the naming data for the face had a relatively flat structure with few embedded subclusters (Figure 4), but the naming data for the body exhibited a deeper hierarchy, with clusters embedded within higher-order clusters (Figure 5).

Figure 4:

Cluster analysis of the face stimuli, with average lexical (form) similarity (calculated using cosine distances), and the most commonly elicited cognate for each language variety.

Figure 5:

Cluster analysis of the body stimuli, with average lexical (form) similarity (calculated using cosine distances), and the most commonly elicited cognate for each language variety.

Overall, speakers of all languages tended to distinctly name ‘hair’, ‘forehead’, ‘tongue’, ‘tooth’, ‘nose’, ‘ear’, ‘eye’, ‘eyebrow and ‘mouth’, although there were a few exceptions to this. First, ‘eye’ and ‘eyebrow’ were grouped together because some Amami and Okinawa varieties used the lexeme for ‘eye’ in a polylexemic term for ‘eyebrow’—as in English. Second, the terms ‘mouth’ and ‘lips’ showed a closer relationship as many varieties used the lexeme for ‘mouth’ in a polylexemic term for ‘lips’. In addition, there was a subgroup comprising ‘face’, ‘cheek, ‘jaw’ and ‘chin’, as some Ryukyuan varieties did not distinguish between ‘face’ and ‘cheek’, and Standard Japanese did not distinguish ‘chin’ from ‘jaw’. Moreover, while most non-standard varieties had a separate term for ‘chin’, not all speakers used it. Finally, the ‘cheek’ and ‘jaw’ stimuli received similar responses in some sessions, which could be due to the placement of the red dot, which led to varied interpretations of these stimuli across sessions.

In contrast to the high level of distinctness found for parts of the face, Figure 5 revealed a deeper hierarchical relationship between parts of the body. There were four major subgroups: the upper limb (arm and hand), the digits (fingers and toes), the lower limb (leg and foot), the torso (its various parts), as well as some joints as separate subgroups (shoulder, elbow, knee).

Within the upper limb subgroup, the upper and lower arm were distinct from the hand and wrist. For the hand, speakers from all varieties except those from the Yaeyama language area distinguished the palm and the back of the hand—albeit through polylexemic responses for both. Distribution of the modal (most frequent) responses suggests the upper limb parts are lexicalised differently across language areas (see Figure 6). Responses belonging to the te cognate set responses were elicited for all parts of the upper limb across the Ryukyuan varieties, whereas they were restricted to the hand in the mainland varieties. In contrast, responses belonging to the ude cognate set were elicited for the upper and lower arm (lower arm only for Okinawa), but never the hand. Yaeyama speakers (of the Shiraho variety in particular) were the only ones to use the genitive construction ti:=nu udi when describing the upper or lower arm. Finally, responses belonging to the kaina cognate set (elicited in Tohoku, Amami, Okinawa and Miyako) also showed variation: they only appeared for the upper arm in Amami and Okinawa, but for both the upper and lower arm in Tohoku and Miyako where the term was used interchangeably with ude-type responses. For Tohoku, this appears to be individual speaker variation, but for Miyako it was more systematic with some varieties only using udi, whereas others only using kaina.

Figure 6:

Main response types for the upper limb across the Japonic languages.

Moving to the digits, all varieties used cognate forms for fingers and toes, with the toes more likely to be named with the genitive construction lower limb=GEN digit. In addition, speakers of the mainland varieties also used variants of the compound tsuma.saki to describe toes, but never fingers. Finally, there was some variation between speakers in whether they named specific digits distinctly, with the thumbs and big toe more likely to be named with a dedicated polylexemic term.

In general, the individual parts of the lower limb were named with specific terms. That there are distinct terms for the front and back of the lower leg, but not for the front and back of the arm, suggests that there is finer-grained naming for the lower limb than upper limb in the Japonic languages. The core set of cognates was fairly similar across the language areas (Figure 5), and often occurred with language-specific affixes, e.g., momo.ta ‘upper leg’ in Tohoku (cf. momo ‘upper leg’ in Standard Japanese) or kara.suni ‘front of the lower leg’ in Miyako (cf. sune ‘front of the lower leg’ in Standard Japanese). Three cognate sets meaning ‘lower limb’ (aɕi ∼ asɯ̈; hagi ∼ pagᶻɨ ∼ paɴ; and çisa) were elicited either monolexemically or as part of a compound or genitive construction (see Figure 7). In the latter case, Ryukyuan speakers were more likely to use a term referring to the entire lower limb when naming its different subparts—either in a monolexemic responses or as lower limb=GEN [part]. Yaeyama speakers in particular tended to use this genitive construction, mirroring naming for the upper limbs. The use of a ‘leg’ term for thigh and hip suggests that speakers extend its meaning across the entire lower limb. Only Miyako and Yaeyama speakers seem to distinguish between ‘leg’ and ‘foot’, both using pisa for the foot.

Figure 7:

Proportion of sessions in which a term that refers to the lower limb as a whole was used in responses describing its subparts (in black).

Within the torso subgroup, ‘head’, ‘chest’, ‘belly’, ‘navel’ and ‘buttocks’ were all distinctly named across the six language areas. For some parts there was considerable lexical variation (e.g., Standard Japanese atama; Tohoku adama; Amami kamatsɨ; Okinawa tɕiburu; Miyako kanamai; and Yaeyama amasɨ̥kuru for ‘head’) whereas for others there was less (e.g., for Stadnard Japanese heso; Tohoku hettɕo; Amami fuɕu; Okinawa fusu; Miyako m:bu; and Yaeyama putsõ: for ‘navel’). The front of neck (‘throat’) was often named separately, but some speakers named it using the same term they also used for the back of the neck. The upper and lower back were distinguished in most varieties (except most Amami varieties), which suggests a clean subdivision between the two, rather than a part-whole relationship.

Finally, three joints turned up as separate branches in the cluster analysis, two of which showed high form similarity across the entire Japonic language family. Only one cognate is used to describe the shoulder across all sessions (e.g., Standard Japanese kata; Tohoku kada; Amami kata; Okinawa kata; Miyako katamusɨ; Yaeyama kḁta). The elbow is also named with a single cognate set across all sessions (e.g., Standard Japanese çiᵈʑi; Tohoku çïⁿdzï; Amami çidzɨ; Okinawa çidʑi; Miyako pidzɨ; Yaeyama pi̥tɕi). There were two cognate sets for the knee, distributed between the mainland varieties (Standard Japanese çiᵈza; Tohoku çïⁿdʑakaᵐbü), and the Ryukyuan varieties (Amami tibuɕi̥; Okinawa tɕiɴɕi; Miyako tsɨɡusɨ; Yaeyama sɨ̥puɕiɴ).

Overall, our results suggest that parts of the face showed a relatively flat hierarchy with little variation between languages, whereas parts of the body were organised in a more hierarchical structure with relatively more variation between languages.

2.2.3 Lexical similarity in terms for face and body parts

The previous section showed differences in the hierarchical structure of face and body parts in the Japonic language considered as a whole. In addition, while some parts were described with cognate terms, others showed more variation in forms. To investigate whether face parts show more lexical similarity than body parts, we measured lexical similarity—i.e., degree of overlap between terms used for each part—by calculating the cosine similarities between all language pairs for each stimulus, using the cosine function in the lsa package (Wild 2015). If two languages used the same cognates to name a stimulus, the cosine similarity was 1, and if they used different cognates, 0 (see Table 2).

There was no significant difference between the lexical similarity for parts of the face (M _cos = 0.63, SD = 0.29) and parts of the body (M _cos = 0.64, SD = 0.24), t(50) = 0.12, p = 0.9, contrary to the prediction that face parts may be more similar.

3.1.1 Speakers

Data for the colouring-in task was collected from 37 speakers in five language areas (one Japanese and four Ryukyuan) during a single fieldtrip in 2019. As with the naming task, data was collected from multiple localities, i.e., in multiple dialects. Where possible, speakers had not participated in the naming study, although this was not always possible (given the endangered status of Ryukyuan). As with Study 1, some interview sessions were conducted with multiple speakers, as some elderly native speakers had little experience in performing standardised linguistic elicitation tasks, so analyses were conducted on sessions (see Table 3). In some sessions, younger family members helped with use of the tablet (see Section 3.1.2) but these are not included in the speaker counts in Table 3.

3.1.2 Materials and procedure

Data was collected using the blank line drawings of the human body used in Study 1 (Figure 1). Two drawings were used: a unitary image of the front and back views of the whole body, and a close-up image of the head/face with the mouth closed. We selected several terms of interest from each subgroup of the cluster analysis from Study 1 (see Table 4). We did not restrict our choice to terms that were modal responses across all language areas, but instead chose cognate terms and non-modal terms if these were of relevance to the current study (e.g., terms that are cognate with Okinawa ke:na were used in other language areas as well, but not frequently). We excluded joints and digits for further elicitation.

The task was performed on an iPad Pro tablet using an Apple Pen stylus using the Adobe Photoshop Sketch app. The blank line drawings of the human body were used as the background layer of an image file. All colouring was done in a single file with multiple layers, with a separate layer used for each prompt. After completing the colouring for a given prompt, the layer containing that colouring was hidden and a new layer was created, so that speakers started with a ‘clean sheet’ for every prompt. Participants were presented with each body part term one at a time and were asked to colour in the part it referred to. For the body, participants were instructed to colour in the left, right, front, and back, as applicable. There was only a single image for the face, so speakers simply coloured in the part of the face referred to by the prompt term. In contrast to previous studies that used written forms (Devylder et al. 2020; Majid and van Staden 2015), we presented the body part terms as auditory words as there is no standard orthography for any of the Ryukyuan language varieties (Heinrich et al. 2015). This is also the method used in previous studies of body parts in under-described languages (e.g., Ponsonnet 2011; van Staden 2006; Terrill 2006; Wegener 2006).

3.1.3 Image processing

We superimposed all colourings that were elicited with the same term, creating a multi-layered image in which each layer represented one session, thus creating a single image showing the extensional range of each body part term.

3.2.1 The face

As is clear from Figure 8, there is considerable similarity between the language areas in the extension of terms for parts of the face. Bounded areas (e.g., eyes, nose, ears and mouth) were virtually the same across languages, whereas more variation was evident in unbounded parts (e.g., forehead, cheeks)—see also Majid and van Staden (2015). Most parts of the face were named with distinct terms across languages in Study 1, except the ‘cheek’ in Yaeyama, which all but one speaker named using a term that refers to the face as a whole, so this was not included as a prompt.^[1] The ‘cheek’ also showed the most variation, especially in Okinawa where its range was more circumscribed than in the other Ryukyuan languages.

Figure 8:

Extension of terms for parts of the face. Figures are composite images of the colouring-in data for participants in each of the five language areas.

We found there was little to no overlap in the extension between different parts, even though participants coloured in each part independently (without seeing what they had coloured in previously), suggesting that the parts of the face are highly distinct and do not form a clear hierarchy. The only part-whole relationship that might be present is between the jaw and the tip of the jaw (chin): when prompted with forms of the otogai cognate set, speakers only coloured in the tip of the lower jaw, whereas the whole jaw was coloured for the corresponding terms (Tohoku aŋo; Amami/Miyako/Yaeyanma: agu, Okinawa: kakudʑi). However, not all speakers and varieties distinguish between ‘chin’ and ‘jaw’, and speakers often coloured in a wider area below the mouth for otogai, whereas the aŋo ∼ agu and kakudʑi generally only prompted colouring of the bony structure.

3.2.2 The torso

The colouring data for the neck, chest, belly, and buttocks were highly differentiated with no overlap between them (Figure 9). In Tohoku, most speakers coloured in the entire back for senaga, and only the lower back for kosu, indicating a part-whole relationship between the two. Amami speakers generally recognised only one ‘back’ term, but the exact range differed between speakers. Okinawa speakers showed a pattern similar to Tohoku, with one term referring to the entire back (nagani) and another to the lower back (kuɕi). Finally, speakers of the Miyako and Yaeyama language areas used distinct terms for ‘upper back’ (kusammi and buɕa, respectively) and ‘lower back’ (kusɨ ∼ kutɕa) that did not overlap in extensional range. Some Miyako speakers only coloured in the spine for the kusammi, and one speaker of the Tarama dialect coloured in a larger area for kusɨ, stating kusammi is not used in that variety.

Figure 9:

Extension of terms for the back of the torso. Figures are composite images of the colouring-in data for participants in each of the five language areas.

Study 1 showed large lexical variation across the Japonic varieties for ‘head’, and the colouring in data likewise found considerable variation in the extension of ‘head’ terms (Figure 10). Tohoku speakers’ data for adama was similar to what has been previously reported for Standard Japanese atama (Majid and van Staden 2015), in that speakers generally excluded the face. Similarly, Amami and Okinawa speakers also did not include the face, and not all speakers coloured the back of the head either, focusing on the top of the head instead (similar to Jahai, Burenhult 2006). In contrast, Miyako and Yaeyama speakers coloured the front and back parts of the head as well.

Figure 10:

Extension of terms for the head (front and back). Figures are composite images of the colouring-in data for participants in each of the five language areas.

3.2.3 The upper limbs

The Tohoku varieties generally distinguished a separate hand category te, and an arm category u ⁿ de that covered the area between the shoulder and wrist (Figure 11). Most speakers also recognised a third term kɛna that referred primarily to the upper arm, but some speakers in the colouring in task also included the lower arm. Ryukyuan varieties did not have a specific hand term. Instead, the data revealed an upper limb category tɨ ∼ ti: encompassing the arm and hand, and udɨ ∼ udi ∼ udʑi (alternatively kaina in some Miyako varieties, e.g., Karimata) which covered the area between the shoulder and the wrist. In Okinawa, udi did not refer to the upper and lower arm, but instead seemed to be restricted to the lower arm, with ke:na being used for upper arm. However, as in Tohoku, some speakers coloured in both upper and lower arm for ke:na.

Figure 11:

Extension of terms for parts of the upper limb (front). Figures are composite images of the colouring-in data for participants in each of the five language areas.

3.2.4 The lower limbs

There was substantial similarity in the extension of the lower limb parts across languages (Figure 12), in contrast to the variation found for upper limbs. Speakers of all varieties tended to colour in the entire lower limb (including foot) for asu, hagi ∼ pagᶻɨ ∼ paɴ, and çisa, respectively—although some speakers of Tohoku only coloured in the foot. For sune and its equivalents, some Tohoku and Amami speakers coloured in the entire lower leg, but mostly speakers only coloured in the shin. The two Ryukyuan varieties Miyako and Yaeyama distinguished a separate ‘foot’ category, whereas the other languages did not. ‘Foot’ appears to be a subpart of ‘leg’ based on Figure 12.

Figure 12:

Extension of terms for parts of the lower limb (front). Figures are composite images of the colouring-in data for participants in each of the five language areas.