A contrastive study on the semantic extension patterns of Chinese and Korean body part classifiers

Abstract

In the study of linguistics, body terms are words that denote parts of the human body and, grammatically, they are used as nouns. However, upon examining numerous linguistic materials, it has been observed that body terms do not merely signify body parts but function as classifiers, distinguishing the ‘type’ of the nouns that follow. Although Chinese and Korean belong to different language families, the use of body terms as classifiers can be found in both languages. Notably, in Korean, body part classifiers can be represented by Chinese characters. This can be inferred as a universal phenomenon within the ‘Chinese character cultural sphere’. However, the usage of body term classifiers is not identical in both countries, reflecting language-specific phenomena based on the unique characteristics of each language. This study has conducted a comparative analysis of the usage of body term classifiers in Chinese and Korean and interpreted the mechanisms by which body terms have expanded to function as classifiers from a cognitive perspective.