Names for the uvula in the west of the iberian peninsula: a geolinguistic approach

This article examines the different names for the uvula in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, based on the data in the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI), supplemented by information from regional atlases of Galician, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese and from lexical corpora. Each name is studied from three different perspectives: an analysis of semantic motivations, which are mostly metaphorical; an analysis of geographical distribution which can shed light on processes of language change; and a formal analysis of the most common morphosyntactic structures.