This chapter is a corpus-based study of the relationship between language and thought in general and linguistic and conceptual metaphors in particular, focusing on instances of linguistic embodiment. It attempts to show, with evidence from relevant linguistic corpora, that salient features in linguistic patterns, both qualitative and quantitative, may affect the underlying conceptual patterns of the language users. Native speakers of that language inherit their linguistic experience as part of their cultural and cognitive heritage. It is possible that they inherit the underlying conceptual patterns through their linguistic experience learning and using linguistic patterns with salient qualitative and quantitative features.
The paper focuses on the phenomenon of embodiment via the perspective of meaning approximation, and re-conceptualization in terms of body-part polysemic chains of conceptualization via dynamically constructed categories. In the first part the analysis focuses primarily on the processes in which body part conceptualizations act as special reference points at relevant mental elaboration sites for broader meaning phenomena. The interpretation is further elaborated on with reference to culturally rich image schemas, emerging as a consequence of their dynamic repeatedness. In the second part the concept of embodiment is taken up, the discussion leading to a thesis which assumes the status of lexical meanings as stimulators and instructions to build mental models of objects and events. The framework adopted for the analysis presents examples of body parts from English, Polish and occasionally from other languages and combines interdisciplinary methodological instruments: Cognitive Linguistic construal and conceptualizations, cultural schemas and models, and relevant corpus linguistic tools (monolingual and parallel).
The metaphoric function of body-part terms to denote entire things in other domains is a frequent phenomenon. Body-part terms, are, however, also used to refer to specific parts of inanimate items, a phenomenon which is more frequent in African than in European languages. The names of certain body-part terms are also used within the body domain as modifiers in compound denotations of other, smaller body-parts. There are only few examples where names of animal body-parts, parts of plants or of persons have this function. More frequently the names of artefacts, in particular tools, are used metaphorically as modifiers in compound body-part terms. Compound terms which contain names of part of plants constitute the nucleus. They are likewise rare and have not been found in African languages.
The study is based on data in German, English, French, Dutch, Sango and Zande, but there are also examples from other languages.
This chapter focuses on recurring patterns of semantic extension of body part terms taking into account two major factors which lie at the heart of the phenomenon, one being the so-called embodied cognition, the other – shared culture. While these two factors lead to considerable resemblance among unrelated languages, they encounter the counterbalance of language-specific features resulting from non-shared culture and different language usage practices. The question posed is whether a systematic research program can examine polysemy of body part terms from a cross-linguistic perspective and what kinds of difficulties this kind of research would have to overcome.
This chapter is a corpus-based, cross-linguistic study of musical terms related to body parts in several European languages (Latin and seven modern European languages of different origin: Croatian, German, Italian, English, French, Russian and Polish). Special focus is placed on the role of embodiment, conceptualization and etymology in term formation processes. This rarely researched aspect of musical terminology includes three major thematic areas of musical discourse where body part terms seem to play an important role: organological terminology (terms denoting musical instruments and their parts), terminologies of the theories of musical form (terms denoting various types of musical forms as wholes and their individual parts) and notational terminology (terms denoting Western notational symbols and their parts). While organological and notational terms related to body parts seem to be easily and univocally determinable, the boundaries of the elements of musical form (such as the head, the body, or the tail of a theme or a musical piece) tend to be the subject of interpretation. Similarities between equivalent terms in the examined European languages, together with the restricted collocations in which they occur, reveal the underlying cross-cultural conceptualization processes and shed light on linguistic borrowing. This study, which is a part of a larger terminological project (http://www.muza.unizg.hr/conmusterm/english/), has no direct precedents in musicological literature and provides new avenues for further research.
Heine and Kuteva (2004) list ‘reflexive’, ‘middle’, and ‘reciprocal’ as functions grammaticalized from the noun ‘body’ across languages. The present study, based on data from Pero (West Chadic), demonstrates the grammaticalization of one additional function, namely that of indicating that the object of the verb does not undergo a change in form, place, existential status (emergence or disappearance), or internal state. Most of the natural data indicates that the object in question is either a human or a story character with human attributes. The existence of this function in turn allows us to explain when third person object pronouns are used in Pero and when they are not used. The use of object pronouns is the outcome of the coding of semantic relations between the verbal predicate and arguments.
In Wolof (Atlantic, Niger-Congo), the grammatical uses of the word for head (bopp) with a possessive modifier range from direct and indirect reflexive pronoun to adnominal intensifier through an intermediary genitival reflexive. This study analyzes the semantic continuity between those different uses, and the various ways they are conditioned by their contexts. With direct and indirect (or oblique) reflexives, the reflexive anaphora has scope over two different semantic roles (agent vs. patient or beneficiary) of the same referent. Being restrictively used for typically other-directed processes, those reflexive constructions imply that alternative (more expected) agents are discarded, producing an emphasis on self-affectedness or self-benefit. This ‘centering’ effect on the actual participant is even clearer with the genitive reflexive and the adnominal intensifier due to their adnominal function. In those constructions, the reflexive anaphora creates a re-identification of the referent in the same role, producing an intensive effect by centering on the identity of the referent, discarding again alternative participants. Altogether, the various reflexive constructions in Wolof, emphasizing the agentivity, responsibility or identity of the referent, point to a metonymical use of the head for the person or individual, which is in accordance with its various lexical uses.
Based on the firsthand data from Murui, a Witotoan language spoken in the Northwest Amazon, the study demonstrates how the body part terms ‘back’, ‘face’, ‘mouth, and ‘body’ grammaticalized into the domains covering spatial orientation, time, comparison, counting, and the reflexive. Murui body part nouns did not grammaticalize in isolation; to become grammatical markers, they were obligatorily followed by case marking. This allowed those nouns to preserve the original semantics of the case suffixes, and then to extend their semantics into other domains. For instance, the noun ‘back, spine’, followed by the locative, became a postposition meaning ‘above, on top’, and later also ‘over’, a marker used in comparative constructions and counting. In the contexts in which this process took place, ‘back’ lost its semantic content and many of its original morphosyntactic characteristics.
Situated within the framework of linguistic embodiment, this chapter examines the speech-related terms ‘voice’, ‘mouth’, ‘tongue’, ‘lips’ and ‘chin’ in Turkish to reveal how speech and language are conceptualized in regards to these terms based on the metonymic chain model (Radden, 2001). The data of the study come from idiomatic constructions, which are analyzed in terms of their figurative uses, and the underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies. The findings agree with Radden’s (2001) metonymic chain (i.e. speech organ – speaking – speech – language), which is expressed in conceptual code as speech organ for speaking, speaking for speech, and speech for language. The data unveil cognitive mechanisms for each term such as mouth/lip is a container, tongue movements for expression skill, chin for long talk that yield a general cognitive understanding of them. The study confirms the embodiment of verbal behavior as well as the existence of culture-specific patterns in the conceptualization of speech and language.
The notion of embodiment refers to the bodily basis of human perceptions about the environment, and also structures our conceptual system (Gibbs 2005; Johnson 1987). This is most evidently manifested in the conceptualizations of body parts and organs and their metaphorical extension to various target domains, illustrated by the metaphor of understanding/knowing is seeing, which was considered by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and Sweetser (1990) being universally prevalent. This claim was supported by a range of cross-linguistic studies in English (Alm-Arvius 1993; Danesi 1990; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999, 2002; Sweetser 1990; Viberg 2008; Yu 2008), but also debated by others (Evans and Wilkins 2000; Sharifian 2011), pointing to the fact that the conceptual links between perceptual modalities and abstract domains are grounded in cultural models (Kövecses 2000; Sharifian et al. 2008; Yu 2008), hence they can be regarded as cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian 2017).
In line with the cross-linguistic research on the metaphorical mappings of vision, the present chapter aims at unveiling the conceptualizations of Hungarian szem ‘eye’, in order to test whether the expressions that derive from it primarily represent the eye as the seat of thinking/knowing/understanding. According to the results, it is argued that beside the conceptualizations of perception, emotion and interpersonal power, the understanding is seeing metaphor is present in the Hungarian expressions. However, conceptualizations of the eye in Hungarian are also connected to cultural values. For example, some expressions such as szemfedél ‘eye-cover’, szemmel verés ‘beating with the eyes’ and szemfényvesztés ‘deception, subtleness’ are based on cultural schemas. The chapter further demonstrates that, as part of conceptualization, some spatial orientations attached to the eye may take on certain evaluations, as exemplified in the case of szeme közé ‘into between his eyes’ and its dominantly negative attribution. In this way, the chapter is a contribution to prove the interface between body, language and culture.
The human body has been found to be an extremely productive source domain for the expression of various linguistic concepts in diverse languages and cultures of the world. Although previous research on many languages shows that the eyes are one of those body parts terms that are frequently used as a source domain for the conceptualization of other abstract domains, the Hausa ido is yet to be studied from the cognitive perspective. Based on the cognitive linguistics framework, this paper analyzes the conceptualization of the Hausa ido ‘eye’ and its extension into various target domains, as well as the metaphors and metonymies used in these conceptualizations. The data for this study was collected from a mini-corpus (Will, 2005) and Hausa dictionaries, from which over 150 expressions involving the term ido ‘eye’ were elicited and analyzed. Based on the usage, the term ido was found to be extensively used in various domains including sight, knowledge, attention, decision-making, emotions, character traits, and so on.
The paper discusses various conceptualisations of the intestines in the English and Polish language system and examines the surface linguistic expressions that make explicit the position which the body part occupies within the two conceptual systems. The study, by no means exhaustive, is an attempt to analyse the various roles that the guts play in the human experience, explain how these diverse perceptions came to function in our thoughts and language, and demonstrate the parallels that can be drawn between the conceptualisation of the bowels in the two distantly related languages.
Conceptualisations of body parts across languages have received a great deal of attention in recent years (Ameka, 2002; Frank et al., 2008; Maalej & Yu, 2011; Sharifian et al., 2008; Yu, 2009). Nevertheless, there have been no systematic studies examining the conceptualisations of body parts, and in particular nawsk ‘belly/stomach’, in Kurdish. To that end, the present study employs the analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, 2011, 2017b) to explore Kurdish expressions of nawsk and their underlying cultural conceptualisations. The data consists of naturally occurring expressions collected through a variety of sources including a questionnaire, Kurdish online data, dictionaries, and narratives. Other sources included the author’s intuition as a native speaker and a number of Kurdish native speaker interviews. The results indicate that the body part nawsk functions as the main conceptual basis for a large number of conceptualisations in Kurdish. Nawsk is conceptualised as the locus of a wide range of emotions, attitudes, and moods. It is associated with both positive and negative emotions such as love, courage, sadness, curse, and anger. Overall, it is revealed that in Kurdish, nawsk is conceptually associated with expressing feeling, wanting, and thinking. Nawsk is metaphorically conceptualised as a container.
This chapter is a corpus-based study of the relationship between language and thought in general and linguistic and conceptual metaphors in particular, focusing on instances of linguistic embodiment. It attempts to show, with evidence from relevant linguistic corpora, that salient features in linguistic patterns, both qualitative and quantitative, may affect the underlying conceptual patterns of the language users. Native speakers of that language inherit their linguistic experience as part of their cultural and cognitive heritage. It is possible that they inherit the underlying conceptual patterns through their linguistic experience learning and using linguistic patterns with salient qualitative and quantitative features.
The paper focuses on the phenomenon of embodiment via the perspective of meaning approximation, and re-conceptualization in terms of body-part polysemic chains of conceptualization via dynamically constructed categories. In the first part the analysis focuses primarily on the processes in which body part conceptualizations act as special reference points at relevant mental elaboration sites for broader meaning phenomena. The interpretation is further elaborated on with reference to culturally rich image schemas, emerging as a consequence of their dynamic repeatedness. In the second part the concept of embodiment is taken up, the discussion leading to a thesis which assumes the status of lexical meanings as stimulators and instructions to build mental models of objects and events. The framework adopted for the analysis presents examples of body parts from English, Polish and occasionally from other languages and combines interdisciplinary methodological instruments: Cognitive Linguistic construal and conceptualizations, cultural schemas and models, and relevant corpus linguistic tools (monolingual and parallel).
The metaphoric function of body-part terms to denote entire things in other domains is a frequent phenomenon. Body-part terms, are, however, also used to refer to specific parts of inanimate items, a phenomenon which is more frequent in African than in European languages. The names of certain body-part terms are also used within the body domain as modifiers in compound denotations of other, smaller body-parts. There are only few examples where names of animal body-parts, parts of plants or of persons have this function. More frequently the names of artefacts, in particular tools, are used metaphorically as modifiers in compound body-part terms. Compound terms which contain names of part of plants constitute the nucleus. They are likewise rare and have not been found in African languages.
The study is based on data in German, English, French, Dutch, Sango and Zande, but there are also examples from other languages.
This chapter focuses on recurring patterns of semantic extension of body part terms taking into account two major factors which lie at the heart of the phenomenon, one being the so-called embodied cognition, the other – shared culture. While these two factors lead to considerable resemblance among unrelated languages, they encounter the counterbalance of language-specific features resulting from non-shared culture and different language usage practices. The question posed is whether a systematic research program can examine polysemy of body part terms from a cross-linguistic perspective and what kinds of difficulties this kind of research would have to overcome.
This chapter is a corpus-based, cross-linguistic study of musical terms related to body parts in several European languages (Latin and seven modern European languages of different origin: Croatian, German, Italian, English, French, Russian and Polish). Special focus is placed on the role of embodiment, conceptualization and etymology in term formation processes. This rarely researched aspect of musical terminology includes three major thematic areas of musical discourse where body part terms seem to play an important role: organological terminology (terms denoting musical instruments and their parts), terminologies of the theories of musical form (terms denoting various types of musical forms as wholes and their individual parts) and notational terminology (terms denoting Western notational symbols and their parts). While organological and notational terms related to body parts seem to be easily and univocally determinable, the boundaries of the elements of musical form (such as the head, the body, or the tail of a theme or a musical piece) tend to be the subject of interpretation. Similarities between equivalent terms in the examined European languages, together with the restricted collocations in which they occur, reveal the underlying cross-cultural conceptualization processes and shed light on linguistic borrowing. This study, which is a part of a larger terminological project (http://www.muza.unizg.hr/conmusterm/english/), has no direct precedents in musicological literature and provides new avenues for further research.
Heine and Kuteva (2004) list ‘reflexive’, ‘middle’, and ‘reciprocal’ as functions grammaticalized from the noun ‘body’ across languages. The present study, based on data from Pero (West Chadic), demonstrates the grammaticalization of one additional function, namely that of indicating that the object of the verb does not undergo a change in form, place, existential status (emergence or disappearance), or internal state. Most of the natural data indicates that the object in question is either a human or a story character with human attributes. The existence of this function in turn allows us to explain when third person object pronouns are used in Pero and when they are not used. The use of object pronouns is the outcome of the coding of semantic relations between the verbal predicate and arguments.
In Wolof (Atlantic, Niger-Congo), the grammatical uses of the word for head (bopp) with a possessive modifier range from direct and indirect reflexive pronoun to adnominal intensifier through an intermediary genitival reflexive. This study analyzes the semantic continuity between those different uses, and the various ways they are conditioned by their contexts. With direct and indirect (or oblique) reflexives, the reflexive anaphora has scope over two different semantic roles (agent vs. patient or beneficiary) of the same referent. Being restrictively used for typically other-directed processes, those reflexive constructions imply that alternative (more expected) agents are discarded, producing an emphasis on self-affectedness or self-benefit. This ‘centering’ effect on the actual participant is even clearer with the genitive reflexive and the adnominal intensifier due to their adnominal function. In those constructions, the reflexive anaphora creates a re-identification of the referent in the same role, producing an intensive effect by centering on the identity of the referent, discarding again alternative participants. Altogether, the various reflexive constructions in Wolof, emphasizing the agentivity, responsibility or identity of the referent, point to a metonymical use of the head for the person or individual, which is in accordance with its various lexical uses.
Based on the firsthand data from Murui, a Witotoan language spoken in the Northwest Amazon, the study demonstrates how the body part terms ‘back’, ‘face’, ‘mouth, and ‘body’ grammaticalized into the domains covering spatial orientation, time, comparison, counting, and the reflexive. Murui body part nouns did not grammaticalize in isolation; to become grammatical markers, they were obligatorily followed by case marking. This allowed those nouns to preserve the original semantics of the case suffixes, and then to extend their semantics into other domains. For instance, the noun ‘back, spine’, followed by the locative, became a postposition meaning ‘above, on top’, and later also ‘over’, a marker used in comparative constructions and counting. In the contexts in which this process took place, ‘back’ lost its semantic content and many of its original morphosyntactic characteristics.
Situated within the framework of linguistic embodiment, this chapter examines the speech-related terms ‘voice’, ‘mouth’, ‘tongue’, ‘lips’ and ‘chin’ in Turkish to reveal how speech and language are conceptualized in regards to these terms based on the metonymic chain model (Radden, 2001). The data of the study come from idiomatic constructions, which are analyzed in terms of their figurative uses, and the underlying conceptual metaphors and metonymies. The findings agree with Radden’s (2001) metonymic chain (i.e. speech organ – speaking – speech – language), which is expressed in conceptual code as speech organ for speaking, speaking for speech, and speech for language. The data unveil cognitive mechanisms for each term such as mouth/lip is a container, tongue movements for expression skill, chin for long talk that yield a general cognitive understanding of them. The study confirms the embodiment of verbal behavior as well as the existence of culture-specific patterns in the conceptualization of speech and language.
The notion of embodiment refers to the bodily basis of human perceptions about the environment, and also structures our conceptual system (Gibbs 2005; Johnson 1987). This is most evidently manifested in the conceptualizations of body parts and organs and their metaphorical extension to various target domains, illustrated by the metaphor of understanding/knowing is seeing, which was considered by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and Sweetser (1990) being universally prevalent. This claim was supported by a range of cross-linguistic studies in English (Alm-Arvius 1993; Danesi 1990; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999, 2002; Sweetser 1990; Viberg 2008; Yu 2008), but also debated by others (Evans and Wilkins 2000; Sharifian 2011), pointing to the fact that the conceptual links between perceptual modalities and abstract domains are grounded in cultural models (Kövecses 2000; Sharifian et al. 2008; Yu 2008), hence they can be regarded as cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian 2017).
In line with the cross-linguistic research on the metaphorical mappings of vision, the present chapter aims at unveiling the conceptualizations of Hungarian szem ‘eye’, in order to test whether the expressions that derive from it primarily represent the eye as the seat of thinking/knowing/understanding. According to the results, it is argued that beside the conceptualizations of perception, emotion and interpersonal power, the understanding is seeing metaphor is present in the Hungarian expressions. However, conceptualizations of the eye in Hungarian are also connected to cultural values. For example, some expressions such as szemfedél ‘eye-cover’, szemmel verés ‘beating with the eyes’ and szemfényvesztés ‘deception, subtleness’ are based on cultural schemas. The chapter further demonstrates that, as part of conceptualization, some spatial orientations attached to the eye may take on certain evaluations, as exemplified in the case of szeme közé ‘into between his eyes’ and its dominantly negative attribution. In this way, the chapter is a contribution to prove the interface between body, language and culture.
The human body has been found to be an extremely productive source domain for the expression of various linguistic concepts in diverse languages and cultures of the world. Although previous research on many languages shows that the eyes are one of those body parts terms that are frequently used as a source domain for the conceptualization of other abstract domains, the Hausa ido is yet to be studied from the cognitive perspective. Based on the cognitive linguistics framework, this paper analyzes the conceptualization of the Hausa ido ‘eye’ and its extension into various target domains, as well as the metaphors and metonymies used in these conceptualizations. The data for this study was collected from a mini-corpus (Will, 2005) and Hausa dictionaries, from which over 150 expressions involving the term ido ‘eye’ were elicited and analyzed. Based on the usage, the term ido was found to be extensively used in various domains including sight, knowledge, attention, decision-making, emotions, character traits, and so on.
The paper discusses various conceptualisations of the intestines in the English and Polish language system and examines the surface linguistic expressions that make explicit the position which the body part occupies within the two conceptual systems. The study, by no means exhaustive, is an attempt to analyse the various roles that the guts play in the human experience, explain how these diverse perceptions came to function in our thoughts and language, and demonstrate the parallels that can be drawn between the conceptualisation of the bowels in the two distantly related languages.
Conceptualisations of body parts across languages have received a great deal of attention in recent years (Ameka, 2002; Frank et al., 2008; Maalej & Yu, 2011; Sharifian et al., 2008; Yu, 2009). Nevertheless, there have been no systematic studies examining the conceptualisations of body parts, and in particular nawsk ‘belly/stomach’, in Kurdish. To that end, the present study employs the analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, 2011, 2017b) to explore Kurdish expressions of nawsk and their underlying cultural conceptualisations. The data consists of naturally occurring expressions collected through a variety of sources including a questionnaire, Kurdish online data, dictionaries, and narratives. Other sources included the author’s intuition as a native speaker and a number of Kurdish native speaker interviews. The results indicate that the body part nawsk functions as the main conceptual basis for a large number of conceptualisations in Kurdish. Nawsk is conceptualised as the locus of a wide range of emotions, attitudes, and moods. It is associated with both positive and negative emotions such as love, courage, sadness, curse, and anger. Overall, it is revealed that in Kurdish, nawsk is conceptually associated with expressing feeling, wanting, and thinking. Nawsk is metaphorically conceptualised as a container.