Paper short abstract:

This paper compares collocations as used in Tamil, Malay and English.The second part of the paper discusses on how movement of South Indians to South East Asia has influenced word knowledge and word use of neighboring language communities.

Paper long abstract:

This article discusses the use psycho collocations in Tamil to assign individual behavior and personality traits. The paper extends from Matisoff's (1986) observation that the use of body parts in psycho collocation is a unique south east Asian areal linguistic features and there are areas of similarities among a number of Asian languages. This paper used expressions from Tamil to explain how human characteristics and traits are described. Then collocations from Tamil, Malay and English are analyzed to reveal a pattern in meaning construction. The second part of the paper will explore various body parts and how they have been co-constructed over time and context. The third section will conclude with a discussion on how movement of South Indians to different parts of South East Asian have influenced neighboring language communities.