Difrasismo

Difrasismo is a term derived from Spanish that is used in the study of certain Mesoamerican languages, to describe a particular grammatical construction in which two separate words are paired together to form a single metaphoric unit. This semantic and stylistic device was commonly employed throughout Mesoamerica,^[1] and features notably in historical works of Mesoamerican literature, in languages such as Classical Nahuatl and Classic Maya.

The term was first introduced by Ángel María Garibay K.^[2]

For example, in Nahuatl the expression "cuitlapilli ahtlapalli" or "in cuitlapilli in ahtlapalli", literally "the tail, the wing", is used in a metaphoric sense to mean "the people" or "the common folk".

See also

• Parallelism (grammar)
• Kenning

Notes

1. ^ Hull (2003, p.137).
2. ^ See Hull (2003, p.137); Montes de Oca Vega (1997, p.31).

References

Andrews, J. Richard (2003). Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (revised ed.). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 552–556. ISBN 0-8061-3452-6. OCLC 50090230. 

Bright, William (September 1990). " 'With one lip, with two lips': Parallelism in Nahuatl". Language (Washington DC: Linguistic Society of America) 66 (3): pp.437–452. doi:10.2307/414607. JSTOR 414607. OCLC 93070246. 

Hull, Kerry (2003) (PDF). Verbal Art and Performance in Ch'orti' and Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (Ph.D. thesis ed.). Austin: University of Texas. OCLC 56123278. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/1240. 

Montes de Oca Vega, Mercedes (1997). "Los disfrasismos en el náhuatl, un problema de traducción o de conceptualización". Amérindia: Revue d'Ethnolinguistique Amerindienne (Paris: Société d'Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France) 22: pp.31–44. ISSN 0221-8852. OCLC 4199210. http://celia.cnrs.fr/FichExt/Am/A_22_03.htm.  (Spanish)