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polysemous .
As I see it, the fact that in Yélî Dnye there is no easy way to designate hands without
ambiguity does not demonstrate that the hand/arm term is general rather than ambigu-
ous . Evidently, the hands are habitually designated by the term kêê, which Levinson
glosses as arm/hand , and evidently the speakers feel no need for another designation
which would always be unambiguous. The same applies in fact to the Polish word ręce
and the Russian word ruki: both are ambiguous , but nonetheless this is how Poles
and Russians habitually refer to the hands as such.
In their Introduction to the Special Issue, Enfield et al. (p. 141) dismiss the hypothesis
that a term which covers both hands and arms may be polysemous with some derision.
By this logic, one might conclude that English leg is polysemous, with two meanings
32 A. Wierzbicka / Language Sciences 29 (2007) 14 65
upper leg and lower leg (a conceivable situation). But leg refers to the whole upper and
lower leg together. By the principle of parsimony, polysemy analyses should be avoided .
In fact, the two hypotheses, one concerning arm/hand words and one concerning words
like the English legs, are not parallel at all. In English, nothing forces us to posit an upper
leg/lower leg polysemy for legs, just as in Polish nothing forces us to posit a foot/leg poly-
semy for nogi; the English word legs can be easily defined without any reference to upper
leg and lower leg along the following lines:
legs
a. two parts of someone s body
b. they are below all the other parts of the body
c. they are long[M]
d. these two parts of someone s body can move as this someone wants
e. because people s bodies have these two parts,
people can move in many places as they want
The word long sends us to hands (which is in turn defined via universal semantic
primes), but nothing in this definition sends us to upper leg or lower leg . Certainly,
it is foolish to postulate polysemy without necessity, but neither is it wise to reject the pos-
sibility of polysemy off-hand: parsimony is an important consideration in semantic anal-
ysis, but not the only one.
In any case, the statement that an arm/hand term in a certain language is semantically
general rather than polysemous is just an empty assertion if no unitary definition is pro-
posed (cf. Goddard, 2001, p. 17). On the hypothesis presented here, both the English word
hands and the Polish word ręce (in one of its two meanings, ręce1) can be explicated in uni-
versal semantic primes as shown earlier in this section. The English word arms can be
explicated along the following lines (for a full explication, see Section 8):
arms
a. two parts of someone s body
b. they are on two sides of the body
c. they are long[M]
d. the top[M] parts of these two parts are near the top[M] of the body
Apart from the semantic molecule top (see Wierzbicka, 2006a, p. 125) the only non-prim-
itive term occurring in this explication is the semantic molecule long , which has been
explicated, with reference to hands , elsewhere (Wierzbicka, in press-a) (see Section 6).
The second meaning of the Polish word ręce (ręce2) can be explicated along similar lines
(though not identically; see Section 8). But what sort of meaning could be proposed as a
unitary general meaning covering both hands and arms ? The onus is on those who have
suggested that there is such a unitary indigenous meaning but have so far not attempted to
show what it is.
There are two claims recurring in the Special Issue which seem to me to be incompat-
ible: one, that in a language like Yélî Dnye (or Polish) there is no word for hand (but
apparently, there is a word for arm ), and another, that a language like Yélî Dnye (or Pol-
ish) has neither a word for hand nor a word for arm but has a word for some general
meaning which represents a cross between the English hand and the English arm and
A. Wierzbicka / Language Sciences 29 (2007) 14 65 33
which can only be identified in English, not in Yélî Dnye (or Polish) itself. The Special
Issue does not make it clear which of these two interpretations is being proposed, but
as discussed, neither of them seems tenable.
6. The role of hands as a basis for shape concepts
One last argument for the polysemy of arm/hand words in languages which make no
lexical distinction between hands and (roughly) arms has to do with the role of shape
in ethnoanatomy, across languages. Given the complexity of this issue and its dependence
on the semantics of shape, this last argument for the polysemy of arm/hand words cannot
be fully presented here (for further discussion, see Wierzbicka, in press-a). Nonetheless,
this argument needs to be at least signalled in the present context.
The main point has already been adumbrated: most external body-part concepts in
all languages appear to include a reference to a given body part s shape (a point recognized
by Andersen, 1978). For example, in English any plausible way to explicate the meaning of
the words arms and legs must include a mention of the long (elongated) shape of the
referents, along the following lines (partial explications only, for full explications, see Sec-
tion 8.2):
arms two long parts of someone s body on two sides of the body
legs two long parts of someone s body, below all the other parts of the body
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