Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). Bodies and their parts: An NSM approach to semantic typology. Language Sciences, 29, 14-65. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2006.07.002
This paper puts forward, on the basis of evidence and analysis, seven general principles of conceptualization of the body, reflected in the semantic organization of the ‘body and body-parts’ field
across languages. It supplies a large set of semantic explications of English body-part terms, and it shows how ethno-anatomies can be described and compared through the use of the natural semantic
metalanguage (NSM). It also returns to the controversial issue of the body-centric character of language
and cognition. One of its goals is to vindicate well-established semantic universals such as body and part. More generally, the paper argues that semantic typology requires a semantic methodology and it shows what a theoretically anchored semantic typology can look like.
