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The results in this study give evidence for Zhao’s work (2010): most of the
metonymic and metaphorical meanings proposed in Zhao’s work are also found in our data. However, some metonymic and metaphorical meanings which are not proposed in Zhao’s work (2010) are identified in this present study. Therefore, this current study provides a more comprehensive picture of real linguistic usage in the case of the six body-part terms.
5.3 Directions for Future Studies
Directions for future studies concerning the scope of the data are discussed below.
This current study only investigates the linguistic expressions used in the case of the six body-part terms in disyllabic words. Although it is considered that disyllabic words are the most frequently used, some linguistic expressions in trisyllabic, tetrasyllabic, or even pentasyllabic words (usually idioms) can still be found in our everyday linguistic interactions. It is suggested that the picture of the linguistic expressions with the six body-part terms will be more complete if trisyllabic, tetrasyllabic, and pentasyllabic words are also included.
As mentioned earlier, it is proposed that a labor-sharing phenomenon can be found in the use of each pair of body-part terms. However, the reasons for the
existence of this labor-sharing phenomenon still cannot be fully derived based on our data and analysis. In addition, although the Sinica Corpus 4.0 is regarded as the largest and balanced Mandarin Chinese corpus, the data in the Sinica Corpus 4.0 has not been updated since 2007. Some novel and newly-created linguistic expressions cannot be found in Sinica Corpus 4.0. For instance, tā bèi xǐliǎn / dǎliǎn /
(‘he is humiliated’) or tā hěn xǐhuān zuǐ biérén (‘he often attacks
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others verbally’). However, these expressions are becoming popular these days, and these usages may also be considered important in the study of body-part terms. In addition, it is observed that these novel usages with body-part terms are usually created with those body-part terms that belong to the literal-meaning-oriented group, such as liǎn, yǎn, and zuǐ. It is suggested that these novel usages should be included in future studies and they can be extracted from other corpus, such as COPENS, which is considered an up-to-date corpus of Mandarin Chinese. In addition, it is suggested that an investigation of the labor-sharing phenomenon for each pair of the body-part terms be done based on historical linguistics in future studies.
In addtion, as for the lexicalization types, the semantic features of the six body-part terms - liǎn, miàn, yǎn, mù, zuǐ, and kǒu - appear to be the reason why most of the disyllabic words containing the six body-part terms occur under metaphorical lexicalization and some occur under agrammatical lexicalization. However, some theoretical analyses and reasoning are needed to help deeply investigate this issue.
Moreover, this study only focuses on the linguistic expressions with body-part terms in Mandarin Chinese. A cross-linguistic study of body-part terms will also provide important insights into how people use body-part terms in different
languages, and the nature of the cultural differences that can be found concerning the linguistic usages of body-part terms.
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