The example of ‘yawning’: towards a typology of bodily actions

Abstract

Body part terminology has been studied cross-linguistically, but there are few studies on the typology of body actions. We present a pilot for a typological study of body action lexicalization taking the action of “yawning” as a test case. We look into the morphological properties of words for yawning cross-linguistically, but we also look into what is considered to be the stimulus of the action and to what extent it is under control: in popular opinion (culture), in linguistic expression, and biomedically. The pilot results in recommendations for data collection for such a typological study.