Head and Face Parts Naming in Kurdish: Lexical Diversity and Productivity

Abstract

This work tries to study head and face parts naming in Kurdish. We figured out that linguistically, Kurdish sometimes tends to segment some of face and head parts more precisely. That is, there are sometimes several different words to refer to a single part. The opposite is rarely true; a word is used to refer to two parts. It should be noted that, this diversity is the result of context differentiation in Kurdish, because some words are used to show dysphemism and the others euphemism. On the other hand, some languages do not make this distinction so precisely. This is why, some of Kurdish equivalents can not be found in English. These differences will be highlighted through linguistic relativity. Another facet of this article is devoted to analyze the fact that some of these Kurdish words are more productive in the process of word-formation. Namely a simple noun is combined with other morphemes to form a new word of the same or different category and meaning. Some of these items are considered as idiomatic expressions.