A typology of ‘finger’ as ‘little hand’: a shared morphological strategy in Western Yue-speaking Region
Conference Presentation, 32nd Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-32),
This talk examines a small but revealing morpholexical pattern in Sinitic body-part terminology: the expression of ‘finger’ through a hand-denoting base plus diminutive morphology, or a “little hand” strategy. Rather than treating these forms as isolated lexical curiosities, the talk uses them as a lens for thinking about how body-part meanings, diminutive morphology, and regional distribution intersect in southern China.