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Part of
Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
Edited by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 13] 2020
► pp. 181–202

Chapter 9
Embodiment, personification, identity

Metaphor and world view in a Brazilian Tupian culture and language

| Federal University of Rondônia
| University of East Anglia
| Hunan University

In this paper we address ontological metaphorical linguistic expressions in a Brazilian Tupian language and culture, based on conceptual metaphor theory. We focus on metaphors of personification and body part constructions in the Amondawa language; analyzing examples from retellings of mythical narrative texts and from complex sentences and compound words. We explore the relations for the speakers of this indigenous language between their experience of physical and mythical domains and their linguistic conceptualizations, as a window to understanding the relations between language, thought, identity and culture. We offer a speculative interpretation of the pervasiveness of personification in this language in terms of an ontology claimed to be common in Amazonian cultures, that in anthropology goes by the name of perspectivism.

Keywords: conceptual metaphor, personification, Amazonian languages, Tupian languages, perspectivism
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The language-thought-culture-identity nexus
  • Metaphor, embodiment and personification
  • Personification in the everyday language of the Amondawa people
    • Personification of moon, stars and night in the retelling of the myth of the moon
    • The personification of the house through body part metaphor
    • Personification in nominal constructions
    • Figurative metaphors based on embodiment/personification
    • Descriptive nominalization based on similitude/association
  • Concluding reflections
  • Notes
  • References
  • Dictionaries
Published online: 30 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.13.09sam
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