Chapter 11

The contact origin(s) of ‘hand’ and ‘foot’ > ‘limb’ in Antioquian Spanish

This study examines the semantic extension of mano ‘hand’ and pie ‘foot’ to their contemporary senses of ‘upper limb’ and ‘lower limb’ in Spanish varieties of Antioquia, Colombia. This dialectally idiosyncratic pattern, hitherto unexplained in the literature, is accounted for here as the combined outcome of adult acquisition among various groups. First, Chocoan languages predominating in the region throughout the early colonial period show a congruent pattern in the lexemes for ‘upper limb’ (e.g., Embera Chamí húa) and ‘lower limb’ (e.g., Embera Catío hẽ́ɾṹ), and their speakers plausibly initiated the change via L1 transfer. Chroniclers’ accounts also reveal that Antioquia’s earliest Europeans relied heavily upon enslaved African(-descendants), and records of ships carrying enslaved peoples to the nearby port cities demonstrate that much of the African-born population in 16th-century Antioquia spoke languages with congruent patterns also (e.g., Kikongo kóoko ‘upper limb’ and kúulu ‘lower limb’). It is proposed that adult Spanish learners with these L1s reinforced the innovative variant.