General Linguistics

This paper presents a survey of the body part domain in the Mon-Khmer lan-guage Kammu. The descriptive part of the paper consists of word lists with belonging discussions and illustrations. The two major systems of relations between body part terms are the hierarchical possessive system and the spatial system. These findings support the notion that we categorize our body in dif-ferent coexisting systems. Kammu adheres to most of the posited body part universals, with the nota-ble exception that in some contexts one can refer to the foot with greater detail than to the hand. The last part of the paper compares Kammu with the distantly related lan-guage Jahai and the unrelated Tai-Kadai language Lao. Lao has had a lot of influence over Kammu, and this has affected the body part categorization. Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Kàm Ràw for giving me the possibility to investigate hi