Language Sciences: Iwona Kraska-Szlenk

Language Sciences 44 (2014) 15–39
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
Semantic extensions of body part terms: common patterns

and their interpretation
Iwona Kraska-Szlenk ⇑
University of Warsaw, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: The article focuses on the human body as source domain in conceptualization of things and
Received 16 October 2013 abstract notions in various target domains. Cross-linguistic data of European and
Received in revised form 5 February 2014 non-European languages are brought to attention to demonstrate a striking convergence
Accepted 21 February 2014
in lexical transfer of body part terms in the ‘embodied’ domains of emotions, knowledge
and reasoning, social interactions and values. Common patterns are also observed in gram-
maticalization and in other external domains. The analysis takes into account three differ-
Keywords:
ent, but interrelated perspectives: cognition and conceptualization, culture, and usage
Body part terms
Lexical semantics
criteria in order to explain cross-linguistic similarities and differences. It is demonstrated
Metaphor how the findings contribute to the research on language universals, but also to the
Metonymy linguistic studies of cultural models.
Universals Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the
nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all
the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim)
1. Introduction
1.1. The embodiment hypothesis
The conceptualization of the human body as a machine can be admirably entertained in the literary works, as in the above
fragment of Milan Kundera’s novel. In recent years, the body has been more and more often thought of as a sort of mecha-
nism, due to an increasing amount of high technology surrounding us nowadays from birth until death. Likewise, the human
mind is often compared to a computer, and thus computer science terminology is now commonly used in reference to peo-
ple’s thinking and feeling, especially in the language of youngsters.1 If human speaking abilities had been formed in the time of
high technology, or, to put it differently, if high technology had always been omnipresent and, specifically, at the time when
humans started and continued to speak, the direction of metaphor structuring exemplified by the above excerpt from Kundera’s
⇑ Tel.: +48 225520517

E-mail address: i.e.kraska-szlenk@uw.edu.pl
1
Cf. English reset or revamp transferred from objects onto people: reset/revamp oneself; or the Polish examples: zawiesić sie˛ ‘freeze’ (of the computer), lit.
‘hang up-refl.’, transferred as ‘be absent-minded’, ‘cut out’ (of the conversation)’, and zresetować ‘reset’ (of the computer), transferred as zresetować sie˛, lit. ‘reset
refl.’ used in the sense of ‘revamp’, ‘be ready with new energy’.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.02.002
0388-0001/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
16 I. Kraska-Szlenk / Language Sciences 44 (2014) 15–39
novel could perhaps be more commonly found in different languages and employed to derive the concept of the human body
and its parts from other concepts. Yet, comparative evidence from all described languages demonstrates that within the domain
of language, understood not as a specific idiom of a particular artist or an argot of a certain group, but as a medium of commu-
nication transmitted across generations within a community and as a part of shared culture of this community, the human body
often constitutes a source for other concepts, not the target. This is the essence of the embodiment hypothesis.
The most striking examples of the metaphoric transfer from the human body domain involve cases of a very consistent
mapping of numerous body parts on the corresponding parts of an object, which clearly indicates that the process operates at
the conceptualization level. Basso (1967: 472) provides as many as nineteen Apache (Athapaskan) body part terms trans-
ferred onto the domain of any kind of the modern motorized vehicle. The car/truck is conceptualized as a human/animal
body2: its major parts correspond to the major parts of the body; likewise, there is a correspondence between smaller and inter-
nal parts. Lillehaugen (2003) brings to attention a similar case from Valley Zapotec languages, mentioning five body part terms
extended to various parts of the car, but also four body part terms extended to parts of the table: loh ‘face’, which can be used in
the sense ‘top of a table’, ru’uh ‘mouth’ – ‘edge of the table’, làa’iny ‘stomach’ – ‘the area beneath’, and ni’ih ‘foot’ – ‘leg’. One more
similar example, although restricted to three terms only, is noted by Heine (2011b) for Mangbetu (Central Sudanic, Nilo-Sah-
aran) in the conceptualization of ‘house’: the word for ‘eye’ transfers to ‘window’, ‘mouth’ to ‘door’, and ‘head’ to ‘top’. Australian
languages tend to use human body-based conceptualization of landmarks, which has a strong cultural motivation (cf. Sharifian,
2011). The following examples come from Thaayorre, a Paman language: ngok pungk ‘(ocean) waves’ lit. ‘water knee’, raak koo-
miing ‘surface of the ground’ lit. ‘place face’, punth ‘(tree) branches’ lit. ‘arms’ and wuurr ‘twigs’ lit. ‘digits’ (Gaby, 2006: 218). This
way of conceptualizing the landscape is also common in Oceanic languages, as illustrated by the following examples from Mar-
quesan, a Polynesian language of the Marquesas Islands, cf. tua ‘mountain range’ lit. ‘spine’, ivi ‘mountain range peak, hill’ lit.
‘bone’, mata’ ae ‘cape’ lit. ‘eye’ + ‘forehead’ (Cablitz, 2008: 205).
More commonly, the body-based conceptualization is more restricted and uses only selected part(s) of the human body
domain, often because the target object has a relatively simple structure, with only few distinguishable (important) parts.
For example, in Polish, the salient parts of various static objects as well as moving/movable machines (as cranes, robots,
etc.) are conceptualized and named after a rather limited set of body parts, such as, for instance, ramie˛ ‘arm’, noga ‘leg’, or
stopa ‘foot’. Similarly, the conceptualization of mushrooms clearly draws on the human domain, using, however, only two
of its terms: nóz_ ka lit. ‘leg-dim.’ and kapelusz lit. ‘hat’; likewise, czosnek ‘garlic’ is referred to as główka ‘head-dim.’ and its
parts are called za˛bki ‘teeth’.
One-to-one body part term transfers in various languages often include the mapping of lexemes such as ‘head’ or ‘eye’ on
various round objects, or lexemes such as ‘arm’ or ‘leg’ on elongated objects, etc. The body and its parts also serve as source
domains for deriving concepts associated with people’s feelings, social and cultural life, abstract concepts of various kinds
and grammatical notions.
One obvious reason for this direction of conceptualization comes from the history of humans and the development of cul-
ture: various objects as well as abstract and relational notions started to be named when the human body and its major parts
had already been named and well familiar as concepts. Thus, using body part terms to name other concepts followed the
natural path of conceptualizing and naming new things after those already existing old ones. However, the above argument
does not explain why the human body still constitutes one of the most common vehicles for metaphoric and metonymic
extensions also in the modern world, in which various objects as well as abstract concepts occur in our everyday life and
linguistic usage, where they are freely available as potential sources, too.
As a matter of fact, a better explanation for the above natural direction of conceptualization lies in the idea of experien-
talism, as originally formulated together with embodiment in Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and developed in Johnson (1987),
Lakoff (1987), and more recently in Lakoff and Johnson (1999). The key claim of the theory is the conviction that human con-
ceptual and linguistic structure is largely metaphorical and grounded in physical embodiment and experience. In the later,
more radical version of the theory, Lakoff and Johnson go as far as to say: ‘‘the very structure of reason itself comes from the
details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also cre-
ate our conceptual systems and models of reason’’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 4).
Various experimental studies argue for a direct connection between the bodily perceptual and motor systems and linguis-
tic performance and processing, pointing out, for example, that the neural area activated during particular perceptual or mo-
tor functions is also activated during language processing of concepts related to these functions (see, among others, Lakoff
and Johnson, 1999; Barsalou, 2008; Bergen et al., 2010; Siakaluk et al., 2011, and references therein). Such evidence does not
only support the embodiment hypothesis by independent empirical data, but directly demonstrates that thinking, under-
standing and conceptualizing in terms of our bodies and bodily functions comes naturally, since it is experienced
unconsciously. And since linguistic structure derives from language use, it is therefore quite literally embodied. The
body–mind–language connection is also expected on purely biological grounds, given the relatively recent time of speech
development in human evolution which imposed an adaptation and exploitation of pre-existing brain capacities in language
2
According to Basso (1967: 473), it is impossible do decide which anatomical model: human or (specific) animal, serves as a basis for this extension, since
the same body part terms are used for both. However, in all known cases of such ambiguity, it is the human body parts that constitute a source domain which
extends to cover the animal body part terms and not the opposite, therefore, the same directionality may be hypothesized for the Apache case here.
I. Kraska-Szlenk / Language Sciences 44 (2014) 15–39 17
creation and processing (cf. Tomasello, 1999, 2003; Evans and Levinson, 2009: 446). The embodiment theory has become
very influential in cognitive linguistic studies and even its critics accept some of its basic tenets.3
In this article, the notion of embodiment will be used in the original, most narrow sense of the directionality of concep-
tualization and metaphoric mapping. It should be noted, however, that subsequent authors have extended and modified the
concept of embodiment in many different directions (see Rohrer, 2007 for a review), so that now it may refer to various fac-
tors in social and cultural contexts, too; it may also treat cultural artifacts as ‘‘extensions’’ of the human body.
If the embodiment hypothesis is true (and this position is also shared by the present author), one must not ignore the
overwhelming evidence that seems to contradict it, especially that it consists of numerous cases of naming various body
parts by reference to human-made objects or even landmarks. For example, the notion of the body part ‘palate’ referred
to as the roof of the mouth is conceptualized in English by reference to the well known object – a part of the house. The same
concept is rendered in some languages by reference to the well known landmark, the sky, cf. Polish podniebienie – a noun
derived from the prepositional phrase pod niebem ‘under the sky’, Spanish cielo de la boca lit. ‘sky of the mouth’. Other rarely
used body part terms tend to be conceptualized and named after familiar objects, too, cf. English belly button or umbilical
cord. Looking more thoroughly at the body part popular lexicon (i.e. leaving apart specialized anatomic terminology), we
can notice quite a number of such instances (cf. Brown and Witkowski, 1981). We can also observe how this terminology
complies with the general rules of morphology and derivation governing particular languages, as demonstrated by the fol-
lowing examples of Polish terms for human bones and their English equivalents, rendered in Polish by diminutives of nouns
denoting various objects, and in English by compounds: mostek ‘breastbone’ lit. ‘bridge-dim.’, łopatka ‘shoulder blade’ lit.
‘shovel-dim.’, rzepka ‘kneecap’ lit. ‘turnip-dim.’
The above examples by no means undermine the embodiment hypothesis, but simply point out that the theory is best
appreciated when corroborated with evidence coming from language usage and the criteria which have an effect on it. Only
these body parts which are perceptually salient, important (in everyday life or symbolically), and frequently talked (thought/
written) about, have simple non-derived structure typically accompanied by a short phonological form. These are the basic-
level terms from the psycholinguistic perspective and words which, due to their salience and high frequency of use, tend to
develop polysemous meanings. As a result, the same body parts are consciously and unconsciously experienced more than
others, of rarer use and less importance, which makes the former even more predisposed to serve as source concepts again
and again, with still increasing frequency of appropriate body part terms. If, for example, the feeling of pain in the temple(s)
part of the head is referred to as headache, rather than as *templeache, it first and foremost contributes to a higher number of
uses of the word head, at the same time negatively affecting the frequency of the word temple. But it also influences our con-
ceptualization and experience of the pain as felt somewhere within the head. As a result, not only the salience and entrench-
ment of the lexeme head increases, but that of the concept, too.
The distinction between different body part terms based on salience and frequency of use accounts for various other bod-
ily-related facts in language, as discussed in subsequent sections of this article. However, in conclusion of this part, it is per-
haps worthwhile to emphasize that the behavior of body part terms with respect to the embodiment hypothesis falls under a
general pattern characterizing various classes of lexical terms and concepts, which exhibit different properties when consid-
ered in terms of their high as opposed to their low frequency members. A simple example can be given from the domain of
the space/time metaphorical mapping. The claim of unidirectionality of TIME IS SPACE metaphor is so overwhelmingly supported
by evidence from grammaticalization that there should not be any doubt about it (e.g. Heine, 1997; Heine et al., 1991a,b;
Heine and Kuteva, 2002). However, we easily find exceptions to it, when we consider certain rarely used, atypical spatial
relations and terms for them. For example, the English spatial expression light year is conceptualized in terms of time; like-
wise, it is the case with expressions used in the military (and known to the general speech community through the medium
of action movies) which specify a target direction by reference to the clock and visualized position of the hour-needle. Facts
of this kind are straightforward when looked upon from a language usage perspective: concepts that are common and fre-
quently used in a modern society, such as ‘year’ and ‘hour’, serve as source domains to grasp new, unfamiliar concepts. A
usage-based approach accounts for the ordinary unidirectional path of metaphoric extensions, as well as for its occasional
reversal.
The present article uses the apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics (outlined in the following Section 1.2) to analyze meaning
extensions of body part terms on other domains from a cross-linguistic perspective (Sections 2–5). The discussion in these
sections, which constitutes the main body of the article, focuses on common patterns exhibited by various unrelated lan-
guages. For practical reasons it would be impossible to discuss all the data concerning major body part terms, thus only rep-
resentative examples are selected. The final Section 6 is devoted to the question of language-specific semantic extensions
within particular cultural models. Conclusion summarizes the results.
3
For example, Rakova (2002) questions the extreme empiricism of the theory, pointing out, among other things, that early child experience is not sufficiently
relevant to the formation of some of the primary metaphors and image schemata, or that ontogenesis does not have to repeat phylogenesis (cf. 2002: 233) and
that abstract concepts may be learnt directly. At the same time, Rakova admits that the achievements of the theory cannot be ignored and removed from
linguistic and cognitive studies (cf. 2002: 237). It is worthwhile to mention that the present usage-based approach is quite compatible with the points raised by
Rakova (2002), since it does not emphasize the infant learning through embodiment and it recognizes the importance of metaphor conventionalization. At the
same time, the present approach heavily relies on the principle of unidirectionality of metaphor structuring which is not objected to (or even discussed) by
Rakova (2002).
The linguistic data from a number of languages are cited after various written sources using the transcription and trans-
lation given there. The data coming from my own research are given without reference (or with reference to my previous
work); these include mostly the data from Polish and Swahili (for which electronic corpora have also been used), as well
as sporadic examples from several European languages and modern standard and dialectal Arabic.4 Some data from other
languages given without reference have been gathered from available dictionaries and verified by my colleagues from the
University of Warsaw, or have been provided by them directly to me (see Acknowledgements).
1.2. Theoretical assumptions
The analysis of body-part terms in this article assumes an integrated approach within the model of Cognitive Linguistics
taking into account three different, but interrelated perspectives: cognition and conceptualization, usage criteria, and cul-
ture. Cognition and conceptualization shape universal and language-specific paths of extending new meanings, but they
can be entrenched only through language usage in a specific cultural environment of a speech community. Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) and the subsequent work on the conceptual metaphor and metonymy in semantic change (Sweetser, 1990;
Heine et al., 1991a,b; Heine, 1997), provide an essential insight as to the first of the aforementioned aspects. With regard to
the second one, the inspiration comes from numerous studies conducted within the so-called ‘usage-based’ and ‘evolutionary’
approaches, such as, among others, Langacker (1987, 1991, 2009), Croft (2000), Tomasello (2003), Evans (2006), Bybee (2007),
Heine and Kuteva (2007), Steen (2007). Culture has always been treated as an indispensable element of Cognitive Linguistics
analyses, and receives even more attention in recent research, see, for example, Lakoff (1987), Palmer (1996), Kövecses
(2005), Yu (2009), Sharifian (2011).
According to the basic assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, a lexical category is not composed of listed concepts or mean-
ings, but constitutes an organized representation of potential concepts or meanings which can be activated and constructed
in specific speech acts. Such understanding of lexical semantics comprises all cases of actual occurrences of particular senses,
that is such which have been already attested in texts spoken or written in a given language; it can account for a projection of
these attested senses onto new, similar contexts, but it can also capture novel, creative uses of words in senses that have not
been attested yet, but which are extensions of them and which are built according to certain principles and are therefore
predictable to some extent. Under this dynamic approach to lexical semantics, two cognitive processes: metaphor and
metonymy have been argued to be particularly important in conceptualization and lexical category’s extension.
Metaphoric mapping operates in two different conceptual domains. The effects of metaphor have been already illustrated
in the previous section, where various target concepts are conceptualized with reference to the human/animal body serving
as the source concept. The mentioned earlier case of body part terms in Apache extended as names of car parts is triggered by
the metaphor A CAR IS A (HUMAN/ANIMAL) BODY which takes the body as a source domain and a car as a target domain. For the pur-
pose of this article, one of the most important aspects of metaphor mapping is the principle of unidirectionality meaning that
more abstract notions or less familiar ones are conceptualized in terms of more concrete and easily accessible source con-
cepts (Sweetser, 1990; Heine et al., 1991b).
The process of metonymy requires domains’ contiguity or proximity, or, it is assumed to apply within the same domain or
idealized cognitive model (Radden and Kövecses, 1999: 21). Many authors point out that certain directions of metonymic
mapping are more natural and more often become conventionalized than others. For example, PART FOR WHOLE (‘England’ for
‘Great Britain’) is more common than its reverse WHOLE FOR PART (‘America’ for ‘USA’). Kövecses and Radden (1998) distinguish
a number of other preferences relating to anthropocentric view of the world, as well as other perceptual and cognitive factors
which result in commonness of some metonymies with respect to their reverse, e.g. CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED, CONTAINER FOR
CONTAINED, EFFECT FOR CAUSE. Metaphor and metonymy are often viewed as a continuum of related processes rather than two
rigidly distinguished notions and they often co-occur (Kövecses and Radden, 1998; Heine et al., 1991a,b; Radden, 2000;
Goossens, 2002; Peirsman and Geeraerts, 2006).
From the perspective of language usage, polysemy and semantic change is best viewed as ‘‘problem-solving’’, as originally
proposed by Traugott (1988), through context-dependent inference and pragmatic strengthening (cf. Heine et al., 1991a,b;
Traugott and Dasher, 2002; Evans and Tyler, 2004; Newman and Rice, 2004, among others). Under this view, metonymy
‘‘feeds’’ metaphor, since small contextually-induced changes based on contiguity rather than on direct mapping onto a
new domain accumulate and lead to a difference in meaning distant enough to involve a separate domain. Kövecses and
Radden also observe that ‘‘it may not be unreasonable to suggest that many conceptual metaphors derive from conceptual
metonymies’’ (1998: 61). They illustrate this point with an example of the metaphor ANGER IS HEAT which is based on the
metonymic relation between subjectively felt bodily heat while being angry, and its further generalization toward ‘heat’. This
way of looking at metonymy-metaphor relation will find support in subsequent sections of this article.
Metonymy underlies contextual modifications of body part terms used in non-figurative, bodily meanings which, how-
ever, significantly differ in their constructed senses in various contexts. For example, the English lexeme head has a very gen-
eral and highly schematic meaning in sentences as: The head is an important part of the human body, or, People and most
animals have heads. But very specific parts of this general concept are meant in other common uses of the word head, as
when we talk about wearing a hat, a headband, a kerchief or a crown on the head. Such and other common metonymies
4
Conventional orthographies are used, except for Arabic which is transcribed according to the IPA convention.
characterize all major body part terms in different languages. It is also very well known that many languages use conven-
tionalized metonymic extensions of one body part term on an adjacent body part (or on its part, or on a larger body part),
while other languages do not. Typical examples of such ambiguous lexemes include: ‘hand/arm’, ‘foot/leg’, ‘toe/foot’, ‘eye/
face’, ‘mouth/face’, and others, cf. Witkowski and Brown (1985), Wilkins (1996), Wierzbicka (2007), Koptjevskaja-Tamm
(2008), Brown (2011a,b). All issues related to the linguistic partition of the human body and ‘‘bodily’’ meanings of body part
terms deserve a study of their own and for the sake of space will not be dealt with here. The discussion in the subsequent
sections will focus exclusively on figurative senses extended from the source physical meanings. Although there has been
recently some concern as to the question of the universal body partonomy (cf. the contents of the 2006 Special Issue of Lan-
guage Sciences), this article subscribes to the commonly shared opinion that most (if not all) languages certainly have major
body part terms in their lexicons (e.g. Brown, 1976; Andersen, 1978; Wierzbicka, 2007). Such terms, when used in their
physical meanings, in different languages often correspond to each other in various linguistic uses and are equivalents at
the most schematic level of semantic analysis. This equivalence makes a cross-linguistic comparison possible as to identify-
ing the ‘‘bodily’’ source domain which then provides an access to conceptualization of various entities in other domains. As to
the extended meanings in target domains, they are also highly comparable at schematic levels of analysis, although a fine-
grained approach would lead to distinguishing various semantic nuances, as well as cross-linguistic differences in verbal
instantiations of similar concepts. All these questions will become apparent when dealing with specific language data in
the subsequent sections.
The formal treatment of polysemy and related issues, such as: granulity of semantic senses, gradience of semantic change
and its descriptive discretization, the relation between the concept and the meaning (sense, micro-sense), constitute key
questions in lexical semantics and various proposals have been made within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics which
considerably differ among themselves as to the views on particular issues and also as to terminology (e.g. Langacker, 1987,
1991, 2006; Cuyckens and Zawada, 1997; Sandra and Rice, 1995; Croft and Cruse, 2004; Evans, 2006). It would be impossible
to engage in the discussion of these general issues in this article, and I will tentatively assume that an analysis is as
fine-grained as necessary and as coarse-grained as possible, and that such distinctions correspond to different degrees of
schematization of lexical mental representations constructed in various contexts.
2. Extension of body part terms in grammaticalization
The issue of semantic extensions in the domain of grammaticalization has been researched in great detail with regard to
both the data and theoretical insights. The major works on grammaticalization which contain the data on body part terms
serving as source domains include Heine (1997), Heine and Reh (1982), Heine et al. (1991b), Svorou (1986), as well as many
other works devoted to particular languages or language groups. Heine and Kuteva’s (2002) lexicon deserves special atten-
tion since it summarizes the previous achievements of grammaticalization in general and provides a broad access to body
part terms, in particular.
The domain of spatial orientation seems to be the most significant target domain in the grammaticalization of body part
terms as evidenced by innumerable languages of the world. A great deal of data have been described for African languages
which are particularly well known for this path of grammaticalization.5 In Heine’s (in press) synopsis of cross-linguistic do-
mains that draw on the model of the human body in grammaticalization, spatial orientation occupies the first place; the two
other major domains being reference identity (reflexivity) and counting. I briefly illustrate these three main semantic extension
paths in turn.
Some languages demonstrate a full array of spatial concepts extended from body part terms, as illustrated below by the
Hausa examples (cf. Pawlak, 2001, 2010).
(1) Hausa (Pawlak, 2010: 275-276):

spatial term BP term
ciki: ‘interior’ < cikìi ‘stomach’
gàba: ‘front’ < gàba: ‘front part of the body’
ba:ya: ‘back’ < ba:ya: ‘back’
kâi ‘(on) top of’ < kâi ‘head’
ge:fèe ‘side, aside’ < ge:fèe ‘side’
jìki: ‘solid material’ < jìki: ‘body’
bàki: ‘rim’ < bàki: ‘usta’
In Amharic, as in many other Ethiosemitic languages (Abinet, in press), various body part terms developed into postpo-
sitions (used with prepositions, too): some of them still have their lexical sources intact, as in (2a); in other cases, the
etymological source is no longer used as a lexical word, as in (2b).
5
Cf. the following comment by B. Heine: ‘‘Most if not all African languages have developed one or more adpositions via grammaticalization of nouns,
whereby terms for specific parts of the body were extended to contexts where their lexical semantics was backgrounded (desemanticization) and some special
schema foregrounded’’ (Heine, 2011a: 696).
Table 1
Extensions to spatial concepts.
BP term Extension Language examplesa

‘back’ ‘behind’ Amharic ğärba, Aranda ingkerne, Baka pe, Bambara kɔ́, English back, Ewe měgbé, Marquesan tua, Masai orioŋ,
Wolof ginnaaw
‘buttocks’ ‘bottom’, ‘under’ Ewe (a)gɔme, Navajo ’atł’áá, Shuswap ep
‘face’ ‘ahead’, ‘(in) front Bari kɔmɔŋ, Car kú:ʔ, English facing, Halia mata, Marquesan aˈo, Mixtec nùù, Spanish hacia, Turkic bet, Wolof kanam
(of)’b
‘head’ ‘top’, ‘above’, ‘up’ Abkhaz axǝ, Coeur d’Alene -qǝn, Egyptian tp, Ewe ta, Finnish pää, Moré zugu, Shona musoro, Thaayorre paant, Tigre
ra’as, Welsh pen, Zande ri
‘stomach’, ‘within’, ‘inside’, Abkhaz acra, Baka bu, Chinese xin > zhongxin, Coeur d’Alene -ilgwis (‘heart/stomach), Polish wewna˛trz, Swahili nda
‘belly’ ‘in’ (ni), Wolof biir, Zapotec làa’iny
side ‘beside’, ‘next to’ Abkhaz avara, Buriat xažuu, English beside, Uzbek yan, Wolof wet, Zande pati(se)
foot ‘under’ Kisi beŋgú, Zapotec ni’ih
a
Sources: Amharic: Abinet (in press), Coeur d’Alene: Palmer (1999: 146), Ewe: Ameka (1995), Marquesan: Cablitz (2008), Masai: Heine (1997: 63),
Mixtec: Hollenbach (1995), Thaayorre: Gaby (2006), Turkic (including Uzbek): Johanson (2011), Wolof: Robert (1997), Zapotec: Lillehaugen (2003). Heine
and Kuteva (2002) has been used for Aranda, Baka, Bambara, Chinese, Egyption, Kisi, Moré, Shona, Thai, Welsh and Zande, and Svorou (1986, 1994) for
Abkhaz, Bari, Buriat, Car, Finnish, Halia, Navajo, Shuswap, Tigre (see these works for references of the sources therein).
b
In Siberian languages of the Turkic family, the spatial notion of ‘front’ is extended from the body part ‘liver, intestines’ (Johanson, 2011: 755), which
seems to be a rather uncommon pattern. Johanson (2011: 755) also notes that in some other Turkic languages, the spatial and temporal concepts of ‘in front’
and ‘before’ extend from lexical sources for ‘nose’, which has cross-linguistic parallels, but is relatively rare.
(2) Amharic (Abinet, in press):

a/ fit ‘face’ > ‘front (of)’
yä abənnät fit ‘face of Abinet’
kä-abənnät fit ‘in front of Abinet’
kä- bet-u fit ‘in front of the house’
b/ hwwala *‘buttocks’ > ‘behind, after, down, under’
ə-betaččən hwwala zaf allä
at-our house behind tree there-is
‘There is a tree behind our house’
Many other African languages are well known for utilizing body part terms as lexical sources of grammatical spatial
markers; among them, Ewe is particularly striking for its numerous postpositions which have developed not only from major
body part terms, but from many others, rather uncommonly used for that purpose, as for example, ‘skin’, ‘ear’, ‘forehead’ or
‘vagina’ (cf. Ameka, 1995).
Some of the most frequent body part terms which give rise to spatial concepts are illustrated in Table 1, together with
examples of languages.
The transfer from the domain of the human body onto the domain of spatial orientation can be perceived as a typical case
of a conceptual metaphor mapping of a general schema: A (SPECIFIC) POINT IN ORIENTATION IS A (SPECIFIC) BODY PART. This way of analysis is
quite appropriate for a final destination of fully formed grammaticalized terms, as well as for the transfer from parts of the
human body onto specific (analogical) parts of objects other than the human body, as e.g. the back of the car. However, on the
way to reaching complete grammaticalization realized by their ability to express very abstract spatial notions, the body part
terms gradually modify their meaning through metonymy rather than metaphor. Therefore, the new figurative meaning first
denotes the space adjacent to or near to the body part and only later transfers onto the space further away in a given direc-
tion, cf. Heine (1997: 44), Heine et al. (1991a), (1991b) chapter 3.3. Such gradual development can be very well observed in
the linguistic usage of partly grammaticalized body part terms. For example, the Polish word tył, which is etymologically
related to ‘back part; buttocks’6 can be used as the spatial orientation point ‘behind’ in reference to people and objects that
have clearly distinguished front/back parts, e.g. z tyłu domu (samochodu) ‘behind/at the back of the house (car)’. The phrase szedł
z tyłu ‘he was walking at the back’ is understood without further explanation because it makes explicit reference to the back(s)
of the person/people walking in front. But it is impossible to say *z tyłu drzewa (piłki) ‘behind the tree (ball)’. No such restriction
is found in the fully grammaticalized preposition za ‘behind’ (cf. za drzewem (piłka˛) ‘behind the tree (ball)’), which presumably
developed in Polish (and other Slavic languages) from another lexeme denoting the same body part, namely, zad ‘buttocks’, still
preserved in the original meaning in Polish and used in reference to horse’s (and as a derogatory term to people’s) buttocks; cf.
also Russian s zad’i which is parallel to Polish z tyłu.
In some languages, the body part terms extended to spatial orientation may further grammaticalize into the domain of
time, as is the case with the English word back in the phrase: two years back. Such developments proceed according to the
principle of unidirectionality in conceptualization, schematically stated in (3) below, which predicts that more abstract
6
The lexical meaning is preserved in the vulgar form tyłek (with the diminutive suffix –ek) ‘buttocks’. Originally, the lexeme tył meant ‘nape’ and was later
generalized as ‘back’ to cover the meaning of the lower part of the body, presumably as a euphemism.
notions will be conceptualized by taking less abstract notions as their source domains, and which also captures linguistic
antropocentrism by placing ‘person’ at the top of the scale.
(3) Unidirectionality principle (Heine et al., 1991a: 158):

person > object > process > space > time > quality
The unidirectionality principle predicts that more grammatical forms develop from less grammatical ones.7 Specifically, if
body part terms are extended to code spatial relations, they may further extend into time markers (while the opposite direction
of semantic change is unlikely), and possibly into even more grammatical forms, such as causal or conjunctional elements. Thus,
the above mentioned Amharic hwwala may be used as a temporary marker, too, as in the following example.
(4) Amharic (Abinet, in press):

kä-qurs bä-hwwala bunna tät’t’an
LOC.-breakfast by-after coffee we-drank
‘we drank coffee after breakfast’
In Wolof, the body part term ginnaaw ‘back’ extends both to the spatial concept ‘behind’ as well as to the temporal con-
cept ‘after’, still, it is even more grammaticalized in its use as a subordinating conjunction ‘since’, as illustrated below.
(5) Wolof (Robert, 1997: 117):

Ginnaaw faral nga ko, maa ngi dem.
ginnaw to-side-with Perfect.2 sg him, 1 sg. Presentative go
‘Since you have taken his side, I am leaving.’
Heine and Kuteva in their lexicon (2002) report similar examples of extending the term ‘back’ into temporal and causal
markers in other languages, e.g. Moré: pōrē ‘back’ and ‘because of’, or Thai lǎŋ ‘back (noun)’ and lǎŋ-càag ‘after’ (‘back+from’).
Apart from ‘back’, which seems to be the most common body part source for temporal markers, some other body part
terms are found in that function, too. For instance, the concept of ‘future’ can be extended from the lexeme ‘face’, cf. Swahili
uso ‘face’ and usoni ‘(in) the future’ lit. ‘face’+loc. marker. Occasionally, the lexical source ‘stomach’ first metaphorizes as a
locative center and may further develop into a temporal center, cf. Albanian: në bark të javës ‘in the middle (lit. ‘belly’) of
the week’ (Heine and Kuteva, 2002: 54).
As shown by the above examples, which constitute only a small sample of the data discussed in the literature, there is no
doubt that various languages follow the same paths in grammaticalizing body part terms toward spatial orientation and
possible further domains along the unidirectionality scale. Likewise regular, although described to a lesser extent, are the
extensions of body part terms into the two other domains mentioned earlier, which will be briefly discussed now.
The notion of ‘self’ leading to more grammaticalized reflexive markers is often conceptualized in reference to the lexical
source domains of the ‘body’ or ‘head’, as illustrated in (6a) and (6b) below. In Schladt’s (2000) comparative study conducted
on the basis of 150 languages, the former model is judged as the most common one in the group of languages deriving
reflexives from the body source domain and is found in 78% of the data, while the latter comes next with 14.6% of the sample
data; in general, the body as a source domain for reflexives is more frequent (60.1% of the total) than any other lexical or non-
lexical sources (e.g. nouns as ‘person’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, personal pronouns, locative prepositions).
(6) Sources of reflexive markers (Schladt, 2000: 108)

(a) Uto-Aztecan < ‘body’
Cahuilla tax-, Kawaiisu na-, Serrano taqa-, Shoshone nɨɨ
(b) Caucasian < ‘head’:
Abaza c-, Abkhaz –xǝ̀ , Georgian tavi
Various other body parts can also be used in expressions involving certain degrees of grammaticalization towards reflex-
ive markers, as illustrated in the following examples from Hausa, which can be treated as intermediate stages on the path to
grammaticalization, when each body part term still occurs with strong contextual cues necessary for proper inference.
Hence, one’s ‘head’ is used to infer the domain of thinking and emotions, one’s ‘eyes’ occur in the context of seeing, etc. It
seems fair to hypothesize that when one lexical body part term undergoes full grammaticalization, it is leveled onto the con-
texts of other body part terms, presumably because of its higher frequency of use or greater salience, eliminating alternative
lexemes in this function.
7
The literature reports occasional exceptions to the unidirectionality in grammaticalization (cf. Norde, 2009 and references therein), which do not
undermine this principle but simply show that semantic change is sometimes quite unpredictable. In fact, the evidence of degrammaticalization (i.e. changes
from more to less grammatical) demonstrates how infrequent and irregular such processes are in comparison to the massive and clearly structured changes of
the predictable unidirectional grammaticalization.
(7) Hausa (Pawlak, in press):

Ya jawo wa kansa ja’iba ‘he brought misfortune on himself’ (lit. ‘on his head’)
Mu gano wa idanmu ‘let us see for ourselves!’ (lit. ‘for our eyes’)
Allay a haɗa fuskokinmu ‘may we meet (lit. ‘join our faces’) again soon
Ya ce da zuciya tasa . . . ‘he said to himself that. . .’ (lit. ‘to his heart’)
Al’amarinsu na hannuna ‘I am in charge of their affairs’ (lit. ‘their affairs are in my hand’)
Sun haɗa jiki ‘they have collected in a group’ (lit. ‘they joined bodies’)
As to the third common domain in grammaticalization, that of counting, the most common patterns involve extension of
the lexeme ‘hand’ to the meaning of the cardinal number ‘five’, which serves as a pivot to derive other numbers by means of
arithmetic adding, deducting, etc., as illustrated below for Api, the language of New Hybrids, and Zulu, the Bantu language
of South Africa. In some of such systems, the expression ‘two hands’ is consequently transferred onto the number ‘ten’, and
the term ‘body’ or ‘person’ may be used for the number ‘20’.
(8) Api (Heine, 1997: 21):

1 tai 6 otai ‘new one’
2 lua 7 olua ‘new two’
3 tolu 8 otolu ‘new three’
4 vari 9 ovari ‘new four’
5 luna ‘hand’ 10 lua luna ‘two hands’
(9) Zulu (Heine, in press):

6 isithupha ‘the thumb’
7 isikhombisa ‘the index finger’
8 isishiyagalombili ‘the leaving behind two fingers’
9 isishiyagalolunye ‘the leaving behind one finger’
It has been demonstrated by a large corpus of literature (see, Heine, 1997, chapter 2, for more examples and references to
earlier works) that many languages use the body model in the conceptualization of numbers in ways similar to those of Api
and Zulu above. Many other languages reveal traces of such models in the most widespread decimal counting system (based
on the number 10), as in the Mandarin example below, or a quinary one (based on 5), and a vigesimal one (based on 20). In
Comrie’s (2011) sample of 196 languages, as many as 125 are judged as decimal systems, while additional 42 languages rep-
resent either a vigesimal one (with the number 20 as a base), or a mixed decimal-vigesimal system. Cultural factors may
slightly modify the above logic of ‘round numbers’, however, as Heine puts it: ‘‘there are usually explanations whenever car-
dinal numbers or numeral systems are found that cannot be reconciled with the body-part model’’ (1997: 27).
(10) Mandarin (Comrie, 2011)

èr - shí - lìu ‘26’
two-ten-six
Some languages of Oceania use the human body as a source domain for counting in a far more complex way, as described
for Kobon, a New Guinean language (Comrie, 2011). The counting starts with the little finger of the left hand and progresses
through other fingers, then through the wrist and other parts of the arm up to the shoulder (siduŋ) and the number ‘10’. It
then continues across the collarbone and the breastbone, and goes down the right arm to finally end with the little finger and
the number ‘23’. From there, the counting may continue in the opposite direction until the little finger of the left hand is
reached with the number ‘46’. Given the two directions of moving up and down along both arms, each body part term
involved in counting is ambiguous without further context; for example, the abovementioned siduŋ can mean ‘37’ if the sec-
ond round at the right-side shoulder is meant, but the word may denote the number ‘14’ or ‘33’ if the left-side shoulder is
meant.
Comparative evidence of semantic extensions in other domains is not as overwhelmingly compelling as in the case of
grammaticalization, which follows from the obvious difference in the number of studies devoted to each topic to the advan-
tage of the latter but, more importantly, to a difference in the number of possible extended meanings. While grammatical
notions constitute a relatively small target category, all other cases of possible lexical change amount to a virtually infinite
number, being thus harder to observe empirically and analytically. This is also true in the case of body part terms which, as
shown above, have developed relatively few grammaticalized meanings, but have very elaborated networks of senses
extended into many other domains. Still, the rapidly growing literature on the lexical semantics of body part terms in the
languages of the world demonstrates that there is a lot of convergence in general semantic development, too. This can be
best observed in collections of studies on various languages (e.g. Sharifian et al., 2008; Maalej and Yu, 2011) and in contras-
tive studies, especially those which compare unrelated and geographically distant languages, showing only a moderate
resemblance due to borrowing or chance, such as e.g. Kraska-Szlenk (2004a, 2005a,c) on Swahili and Polish, or Siahaan
(2011) on German and Indonesian.
For the ease of presentation, I have distinguished several domains within which cross-linguistic convergence is particu-
larly common, and which will be discussed in turn. These are the following: the domain of emotions including certain
address terms, the domain of knowledge and reasoning, and the domain of social interactions and values. All these domains
are metonymically related to the domain of the human body although they may also involve metaphor as a cognitive mech-
anism. The metonymic bond provides a strong organizational schema for such extensions by which the equivalent body part
terms in different languages follow the same direction of semantic change. In addition, there exists a large area of extensions
which are mapped through metaphor onto the target domains lying outside the domain of the human body. Cases of this
kind, such as e. g. English eye (of the needle), bottleneck, mouth of the river, are more diversified cross-linguistically and tend
to become more autonomous in their form, either by occurring with obligatory modifiers as in the above English examples
(cf. Deignan and Potter, 2004: 1238), morphological marking with affixes, or phonological split (cf. Section 5). It would be
impossible to discuss here numerous similar extensions in any systematic way, and they will be only briefly described
and exemplified in Section 5. Section 6 is devoted to the discussion of the unique and unpredictable semantic development
of body part terms in different languages which, however, seems to show some patterning as to the domains in which it
occurs.
3. Semantic extensions in the domain of emotions8
The literature on expressing emotions through embodiment has a long tradition: it began with the pivotal work of Lakoff
and Johnson (1980) and has continued in many works since then, e.g. Enfield and Wierzbicka (2002), Kövecses (2000, 2005),
Sharifian et al. (2008). As pointed out by many authors (e.g. Johnson, 1987; Kövecses, 2000, 2005; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980,
1999), there is a metonymic connection between experiencing an emotion and physically felt bodily sensation or some other
bodily effect, whether medically proven or popularly believed (e.g. heartbeat, blood pressure, liver impairment), which
makes inner organs willingly conceptualize as loci of emotions. In fact, it would be hard to find a language which does
not use this imagery. Metaphors of the general schema: LOCUS OF EMOTIONS IS A (PARTICULAR) BODY PART have been posited in many
studies devoted to the descriptions of body part terms on the one hand, as well as in the studies on the conceptualization
of emotions on the other. Lexical sources of the figurative concept ‘locus of emotions’ may include such body parts as the
‘liver’, as for example in Indonesian (Siahaan, 2008), or Dogon (McPherson and Prokhorov, 2011), or ‘belly/stomach’, as in
Japanese (Matsuki, 1995; Berendt and Tanita, 2011) or Thaayorre (Gaby, 2008). However, cross-linguistically, the most com-
mon source is the ‘heart’, as in the following sample of the languages of Europe and other parts of the world: English
(Deignan and Potter, 2004; Niemeier, 2000), Italian (Deignan and Potter, 2004), Polish (Kraska-Szlenk, 2005a,c), Swahili
(Kraska-Szlenk, 2005a,b), Chinese (Yu, 2008a), Tunisian Arabic (Maalej, 2008). The following examples from the Swahili
and Polish corpora, as well as their English translations, demonstrate the figurative ‘heart’ as a container in which all kinds
of emotions may be kept and which may be filled or empty, closed or open, etc.
(11) LOCUS OF EMOTIONS IS HEART

a/ Swahili corpus examples:
majonzi aliyokuwa nayo moyoni ‘grief that he had in his heart’
alianza kumfunulia moyo wake ‘he started to open up his heart for her’
moyo wake ulijaa hisani ‘his heart was filled with kindness’
b/ Polish corpus examples:
w sercu przechowam tkliwe uczucie ‘in [my] heart, I will keep the sentimental feeling’
poczuła lekki niepokój w sercu ‘she felt a little anxiety in [her] heart’
serce przepełnione miała radościa˛ ‘she had her heart filled with joy’
The above discussion has followed the tradition of interpreting the heart-locus of emotions imagery as a metonymy-
based metaphor. However, it is worthwhile to consider an alternative analysis. Let us first note that the construal of the
‘heart’ (or any other body organ) as the locus of emotions is rooted in the ontological metaphor: EMOTIONS ARE THINGS. This met-
aphor comes with a number of image schemata associated with the attributes of ‘things’, such as their quantification, qual-
ification as positive or negative, and also their location, since ‘things’ are always located somewhere. Thus the concept ‘locus
of emotions’ follows directly from the abovementioned ontological metaphor and is not a new independent concept which
needs to be grasped and metaphorically construed. Once emotions are conceptualized as ‘things’, their location somewhere
within the person (person’s body) follows directly from their embodied character, i.e. that they are experienced by people
and have bodily sensations that accompany them. In this way, the conceptualization of emotions’ location has a purely met-
onymic basis. The choice of a body organ to represent a specific locus of emotions also operates in a metonymic fashion and
involves narrowing down the ‘somewhere in the body’ location to a unique body part. Consequently, the assumed metaphor:
LOCUS OF EMOTIONS IS HEART can be and perhaps is better formulated as the metonymy: HEART FOR LOCUS OF EMOTIONS, provided that the
concept of ‘locus of emotions’ is construed as an indispensible element of the metaphor of emotions as ‘things in the body’.
The case under consideration here also complies with the definition of metaphtonymy as described by L. Goossens and,
specifically, with its variant called metaphor from metonymy: ‘‘Metaphor from metonymy implies that a given figurative
8
This section is an extended version of a separate paper (Kraska-Szlenk, in press) which also includes some points raised in Section 6.
expression functions as a mapping between elements in two discrete domains, but that the perception of ‘‘similarity’’ is
established on the basis of our awareness that A and B are often ‘‘contiguous’’ within the same domain. This frequent con-
tiguity provides us with a ‘‘natural’’, experiential, grounding for our mapping between two discrete domains’’ (Goossens,
2002: 368).
Regardless of how the figurative ‘heart-locus of emotions’ is formally analyzed, it starts a metonymic chain which leads to
various conventionalized meanings of this lexeme, constructed in appropriate contexts. The illustrative linguistic material
below comes from Swahili and Polish, but very similar examples are found in other languages discussed in references men-
tioned earlier in this section.
The initial metaphor LOCUS OF EMOTIONS IS HEART leads to the conventionalized figurative meaning of the lexeme ‘heart’ as a
‘container of emotions’ which then serves as a vehicle for consecutive metonymies: HEART FOR EMOTIONS (which is an instantia-
tion of the general schema: CONTAINER FOR CONTENTS), as illustrated in (12a), and its subsequent specification HEART FOR SPECIFIC
EMOTIONS (GENERIC FOR SPECIFIC), which in Polish is most often interpreted similarly as in English, namely, as ‘good’ feelings like
‘compassion’ or ‘love’, but in Swahili may have other interpretations as well, such as e.g. ‘courage’ or ‘enthusiasm’, as in
(12b). Another extension comes by the metonymic association between emotions and a person experiencing them: HEART
FOR FEELING PERSON (EXPERIENCE FOR EXPERIENCER), as shown in (12c). These basic metonymic patterns can be further modified to render
more subtle constructed meanings. For example, the last metonymy may be further divided to profile a person experiencing
a temporary affection or a more permanent feeling, a person of certain character traits or just a ‘person’ or his/her ‘inner self’
(cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2005b for a detailed description of Swahili).
(12) Metonymic chains in Swahili (S) and Polish (P) initiated by ‘heart’-‘container’
a/ HEART FOR EMOTIONS (CONTAINER FOR CONTENTS)
S. hadithi inayoweza kugusa moyo wa wanadamu ‘a story that can touch a human heart’
utazame moyo ulivyoungua ‘look how the heart is burning’
P. krzepili serca warszawiaków ‘they uplifted the hearts of the inhabitants of Warsaw’
_
zamysł ten rozzarza serce ‘that intention lights a fire to the heart’
b/ HEART FOR SPECIFIC EMOTIONS (GENERIC FOR SPECIFIC)
S. Wanatuzidi silaha, lakini hawatuzidi moyo. ‘They beat us as to the weapons, but they do not beat us as to the
heart (i.e. courage).’
Baadhi ya watu hulegea mioyo mbele ya dhiki, lakini wengine hukazana mpaka wameishinda. ‘Some of the people
soften their hearts in front of the distress, but others make an effort until they win it.’
P. nie masz serca ‘you have no heart (i.e. feelings or mercy)’
_ mu okaze
ze _ nagle serce ‘that she will suddenly show him heart (i.e. mercy)’
c/ HEART FOR FEELING PERSON (EXPERIENCE FOR EXPERIENCER)
S. Moyo wangu huwa haupendi kuona watu wanasumbuka ‘My heart does not like to see worried people’
Mioyo yetu ilifurahi kidogo. ‘Our hearts rejoiced a little.’
P. serce knuja˛ce niecne zamiary ‘the heart plotting an evil plan’
jej młode serce odwzajemniało wielkie uczucie ‘her young heart returned the great feeling’
One more very common extension gradually built upon the initial ‘locus’ metaphor involves the usages of ‘heart’ (or some
modification of it, as for example the English word sweetheart) in reference to a loved person, which is also used as a term of
address, typically accompanied by the possessive pronoun ‘my’. Lexemes that can be used in this way can be found in numer-
ous languages and include, for instance, the following: Polish serce and its diminutive serduszko, Spanish corazon, Swahili
moyo, and Arabic qalb.9 A number of metonymies are at work here, ultimately deriving the concept of ‘loved one’. We can
assume that the metonymy HEART FOR SPECIFIC EMOTIONS, further narrowed down to ‘love’, is used in its still narrower specification
of ‘love for (specific) someone’, which consequently provides a vehicle to a target ‘loved one’ as an instantiation of the general
metonymy: OBJECT OF EMOTION FOR EMOTION.
Multiple figurative meanings extended by elaborated metonymic chains have become very well entrenched in language
usage and the descriptions of ‘heart’ in various languages agree that the text frequencies of all figurative uses of this lexeme
considerably outnumber its uses in the meaning of the body organ. For example, in my own corpus study conducted on the
data of 774 uses of the word moyo (including 55 uses of the plural mioyo) in Swahili (Kraska-Szlenk, 2005b), only eight uses
referring to the human body organ were found, which amounts to approximately one percent of all uses (apart from two
other uses for the metonymic ‘chest’ and the animal ‘heart’, respectively). In addition, the physical aspect of heartbeat
was mentioned 48 times (6.2%), but this was typically in the context of experiencing emotions, hence it also connoted some
figurative sense. These figures have been obtained for a written corpus and the uses of bodily meanings increase in oral texts,
but presumably not very significantly.10
9
This use occurs in many varieties of modern Arabic, typically with the vocative particle ja and the possessive pronoun -i (ja qalbi /ʔalbi), see, for example,
Rieschild (1998: 619) for Lebanese.
10
In Deignan and Potter’s data obtained from a mixed written-oral corpus, non-literal uses of ‘heart’ are rated at 65% (2004: 1236), which strikes me as very
low. This may be due to the authors’ interpretation of literal and non-literal, which, however, is not discussed in the paper.
While the locus of emotions is figuratively associated with an inner body organ, visible body parts are conceptualized as
sites of displaying emotions on the outside. Various body parts may participate in this imagery (cf. happy/sad eyes, hair rising,
get under one’s skin, raise an eyebrow), but the most commonly utilized source domain is the face. The conceptualization of
the face as a metaphoric ‘‘mirror’’ reflecting and communicating emotions relies on a very solid experiential basis, because
the general look and features of the face indeed change physically and visually as people become affected by particular emo-
tions (cf. Wierzbicka, 1999; Yu, 2001, 2002; Gibbs, 2006; Vainik, 2011). The array of facial expressions is rich and detailed
which makes it possible to convey and decode from it nuances of one’s feelings, moods and attitudes. Given the fact that
emotions are frequently described by reference to the bodily effects rather than directly, there are also multiple ways of
linguistic metaphorical coding of the same emotions. For example, Gibbs notes that anger can be expressed as ‘a blue face’
or as ‘a reddened face’ (2006: 259). A very tight connection between emotions and looks exposed on people’s faces motivates
a common metonymy: FACE (FACIAL MANIFESTATIONS) FOR EMOTIONS (cf. Vainik, 2011; Yu, 2001).
The emotions which are accompanied by clearly visible physical effects have comparable conceptualizations and wording
across different languages, as for example, ‘red face’ stands for the feeling of shame or anger, or ‘white face’ for fear. The fol-
lowing examples of these and some other common conceptualizations come from Chinese and Estonian, but similar phrases
can be found in many other languages, capturing the correlation between a particular emotion and its physical manifestation
on the face.
(13) Chinese (Yu, 2002: 344)

a/ lian-re (face-hot) ‘feel ashamed’
b/ lian-hong (face-red) ‘blush with shame or embarrassment’
c/ hong-lian (redden-face) ‘blush for being she; blush with anger; get angry’
d/ beng-lian (stretch-face) ‘pull a long face; look serious or displeased’
e/ ban-lian (harden-face) ‘straighten one’s face; put on a stern expression’
f/ shang-lian (up.to-face) ‘blush for drinking wine; grow dizzy with success or praise’
(14) Estonian (Vainik, 2011: 54–55)
a/ nasty vales minema ‘to become white in the face’ (fear)
b/ puna tõuseb palgesse ‘redness is rushing to the face’ (shame)
c/ näost hall olema ‘to be grey in the face’ (concern)
d/ pikka nägu tegema ‘to draw a long face’ (disappointment)
e/ nägu krimpsutama ‘to make a wry face’ (disgust)
f/ nägu särab ‘the face is shining’ (happiness)
g/ palg lööb vihast leegitsema ‘the face bursts into flame with anger’
While it is easy to find cross-linguistic parallels in bodily metaphors of emotions, it is also common to find differences.
The above mentioned Chinese expression beng-lian ‘stretch-face’ refers to a stern expression, which is fairly similar to
English straight-faced ‘serious’, but quite different from Swahili kunjua uso ‘stretch face’ which is used in the meaning of
smiling and being happy. The anger metaphor of ‘red eyes’ is commonly used in Swahili (macho mekundu) or in Chinese
(hong-yan, Yu, 2002: 346), but not as much in English or Polish. The English metaphor to have blue eyes figuratively refers
to ‘sad eyes’, but in Arabic ʕajn zarqaʔ lit. ‘blue eye’ means ‘an evil eye’.11 Differences of this kind are fairly frequent and
expected, which is presumably due to the fact that the domain of emotions favors expressiveness which manifests itself in
unusual figures of speech rather than in plain language or easily understood metaphors. Cultural differences in conceptualiza-
tions of emotions also include relative frequency and importance of particular body parts used as source domains for particular
target concepts of emotions. For example, according to Occhi (cf. Occhi, 2011: 180 and the references therein), experimental
studies demonstrate that Japanese people recognize emotions such as happiness and unhappiness by interpreting the expres-
sion of the eyes rather than the expression of the mouth, while Americans look at the shape of the mouth as more significant
than the eyes.
Body part terms also serve as lexical sources for words of endearment, as well as curses. Starting with the former, par-
ticularly popular are endearment expressions with the literal meaning ‘my eye(s)’, which typically occur as terms of address
for the loved ones, especially, one’s children. I assume that this one, as well as other similar expressions with body part terms
as lexical sources, are conceptualized through a metaphor of the general schema: DEAR PERSON IS A (PARTICULAR) BODY PART. While
cases of this kind might at first give an impression of pure metaphoric mapping, since the addressed persons represent
separate domains from those who address them in this fashion, the metonymic link is guaranteed through the domain of
positive emotions towards the addressee, as well as by kinship relation, because prototypically this form of address is com-
mon among family members. Given below are some conventionalized examples (with literal translations) from Polish,
Swahili, Persian, Arabic as occurring in many modern varieties (see Maalej, 2011 for other examples from Tunisian Arabic),
Turkish and Tamil. Swahili deserves special attention for its use of the expression in singular, as well as in plural, and for
having an additional conventional phrase based on another lexeme chongo, which in its bodily meaning denotes ‘one (good)
eye’, i.e. the only seeing eye of a one-eyed person. Such a single eye is certainly more valuable than one eye of someone with
11
Or a talisman against it, also known as ‘the Prophet’s eye’ (nowadays a popular souvenir sold to tourists in the Middle East and parts of the Mediterranean).
A Reviewer points out that in Tunisian Arabic the phrase is used in the sense of English ‘black eye’ (as after a fight).
a pair of eyes intact, by which this term of address gains in expressiveness and emotional load. Other variants of this
metaphor occur with a lexeme for ‘pupil’, as in the English phrase the apple of my eye (similarly in Polish, Swahili, Persian,
Turkish, etc.).
(15) DEAR PERSON IS EYE

a/ Polish:
moje oczko w głowie ‘my eye-dim. in [the] head’
b/ Swahili:
jicho langu ‘my eye’
macho yangu ‘my eyes’
chongo yangu ‘my eye (of a one-eyed person)’
c/ Persian (Sharifian, 2011: 182):
Nasrin cheshm-â-m-e ‘Nasrin is my eyes’
d/ Modern Arabic:
(ja) ʕajni ‘(vocative particle) my eye’
ni ‘(vocative particle) my eyes’
(ja) ʕaju
e/ Turkish:
gözüm ‘my eye’
f/ Tamil:
en kaṇṇeyē ‘my eye’
Other body part terms are also reported in some languages as words of endearment, for example, Amharic anjet ‘intes-
tines’ or hod ‘stomach’ (Wołk, 2008: 89), or Arabic kibd ‘liver’ or ra’a ‘lung’ (Rieschild, 1998: 625). These uses are different
from the case of the ‘heart’ being extended as a term of address discussed above, because the abovementioned organs are
not conceptualized as the loci of emotions in these languages. On the contrary, both Amharic and Arabic use the concept
of the figurative ‘heart’ just like English and other languages referred to earlier. Kraska-Szlenk (2009) can be seen for an anal-
ysis of cases of this kind in the larger context of expressing positive emotions; for the purpose of this article, it suffices to
assume that these lexical sources provide relatively novel, hence more expressive variants of endearment words and replace
the conventionalized body part term ‘heart’ used as a figurative concept of the loved one. In this way, such expressions are
metonymically related to other expressions rather than to the concepts which is captured by the schema: A XFORM OF ONE BODY
PART FOR A CONCEPT EXPRESSED BY ANOTHER BODY PART. Alternatively, but perhaps less convincingly, it can be assumed that the above
mentioned inner organs are conceptualized as ‘dear’, similarly to ‘eyes’ discussed above.
Body part terms may also serve as insults and swearwords. It goes without saying that vulgar names of sexual organs (as
well as the anus, cf. English asshole) belong to the worse dirty words which can be used in the form of direct address, ref-
erence or curses carrying a highly expressive and abusive meaning. Due to the social taboo imposed on such terms, semantic
changes affecting this part of lexicon are particularly fast and consist in either replacing a vulgar body part term with a
euphemism or with another body part term (e.g. ‘back’ > ‘buttocks’). But semantic development may also take an opposite
turn when a pejorative metaphoric meaning of a vulgar body part term gets entrenched in language usage with a subsequent
disappearance of the original basic meaning and consequent devulgarization of the word. For example, the common Polish
adjective kiepski ‘lousy, poor’ derives from the obsolete noun kiep ‘simpleton’, which was earlier used as a derogatory term
for a woman, as well as for a man acting like a woman (‘sissy’), and originally denoted the female sexual organ. Nothing of
the old etymology is synchronically transparent in the pejorative, but non-vulgar word kiepski.
Non-tabooized body part terms are sporadically used in a derogatory fashion, too. For example, Polish noga ‘foot/leg’ may
refer to someone incompetent, inexpert in some field. Aksan (2011) points out that Turkish ayak ‘foot’ is associated with low
status and is used in various expressions indicating unqualified workers or people of low class. In both these languages, the
abovementioned extensions follow from the general image schema: LOW STATUS IS DOWN, but they are additionally motivated by
a metonymic association between unqualified jobs (as of porters, office boys) and literal walking ‘on foot’.
Many other offensive expressions refer to the bodily source domain, e.g. English bonehead, numbskull, pinhead. On the
basis of experimental evidence, Siakaluk et al. (2011) argue that such embodied expressions have more offensive power than
other insults (e.g. idiot), because sensorimotor bodily experience influences their processing. To my knowledge, no similar
study has been conducted on bodily-related words of endearment, but it is fair to hypothesize that such an effect might
be found in this area, too, which could explain the high expressive and emotional value of address terms of the type ‘my
eye’. Finally, it is worthwhile to note a rather unusual case of Dutch embodied terms of address, e.g. bobbel ‘blackhead’, poepje
‘little shit’ or scheetje ‘fart’ (Damstra, 1987), which apparently look like insults but function as words of endearment
(cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2009 for analysis).
4. Extensions in the domain of knowledge and reasoning
In Western culture, the dichotomy between irrational emotions and rational thinking corresponds to the dualistic division
in the conceptualization of relevant aspects of human behavior and allocates them figuratively to two distinct body organs:
that of the ‘heart’ and the ‘head’, respectively, as exemplified by English (Niemeier, 2008). In some other cultures and
languages, one body organ may be conceptualized as a ‘locus’ and ‘center of control’ for both. According to Yu (2007, 2008a),
the understanding of xin ‘heart’ in ancient Chinese philosophy was through the metaphor THE HEART IS A RULER OF THE BODY, which
made it a holistic center of emotional, as well as rational human activities and values, and this conceptualization is still pre-
served in modern Chinese culture and language. Likewise, Thai jai ‘heart’ appears as the locus of emotions as well as thinking
and decision making (Berendt and Tanita, 2011). In Indonesian, it is hati ‘liver’ which has been analyzed as the locus of emo-
tions, as well as the locus of cognition (Siahaan, 2008). These two basic patterns: dualistic or holistic, may have more com-
plex variants reflecting the conceptualization of emotions and reasoning as a continuum rather than one or two things. For
example, Swahili in general represents a dualistic model, in which moyo ‘heart’ serves as the locus of emotions (with all
resulting consequences, as illustrated in the previous section), while kichwa ‘head’ takes care of intellectual capacities and
actions. Due to the container metaphor, ‘thoughts’, ‘questions’, ‘doubts’, etc. figuratively reside in kichwa, just like all kinds
of emotions reside in moyo. Memories are allocated to the ‘heart’ domain, which is explainable by an additional metonymic
association of this organ with the notion of depth, cf. also English learn by heart. However, in the Swahili corpus data, we
occasionally find examples of moyo ‘heart’ in collocation with the kinds of ‘things’ that are expected to be and typically
are hosted by kichwa, e.g. mawazo ‘thoughts’, maswali ‘questions’, mashaka ‘doubts’ (Kraska-Szlenk, 2005b). This points
out that the distinction between the figurative ‘contents’ of these two ‘containers’ is rather flexible.
Independently from the issue of dualistic, holistic or continuum conceptualization of emotional and intellectual human
actions and capacities, the container metaphor, whichever organ it refers to, seems to be well established in different lan-
guages and it initiates many other metaphors that are compatible with it and that organize the domain of knowledge and
reasoning. Jäkel (1997) argues that the conceptualization of thinking and reasoning in English is largely based on the met-
aphor MENTAL ACTIVITY IS MANIPULATION. This metaphor governs more specific metaphors, which conceptualize thoughts as things
that can be gathered or worked out and kept in a figurative storage. According to him, similar models have been found in
other languages, too. In English, the model is realized with the container metaphor referring to the lexeme head, cf. it came
to my head, I have a thought in the head, a head full of ideas, or with the more abstract lexeme mind, cf. open/closed/empty mind;
have/put (an idea) in mind, work out/turn over in mind, etc.
Just as in the case of the ‘heart’ discussed in the previous section, a number of metonymies construct other figurative
meanings of the ‘head’, such as that of a person, as in English per head; a leader, as in head of a state; and many others,
cf. Niemeier (2008); Szczygłowska (in press) for English, Siahaan (2011) for German and Indonesian, or Aksan (2011) for
Turkish.
In addition to the abovementioned container metaphor, which treats one inner body organ as a figurative storage space
for thoughts and a workplace for intellectual activities, languages typically use another body part as a metaphorical instru-
ment or tunnel through which outside knowledge is acquired. Cross-linguistic evidence has shown that the body parts which
are conceptualized in this way are either the eyes or the ears (or, to a lesser extent, the nose), that is, the main perception
organs. Embodiment provides a metonymic link between perceiving a signal, processing it in the brain and interpreting it
conceptually, and consequently it feeds a metaphor of the general shape: INSTRUMENT OF ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE IS A (PARTICULAR) BODY
PART.
The eyes-based metaphor is overwhelmingly found in various Indo-European languages, as first described in Sweetser’s
(1990) study, but also in many other languages, e.g. Indonesian (Siahaan, 2011), Tunisian Arabic (Maalej, 2011), as well as in
Swahili, as will be shown subsequently. Sweetser (1990) made her argument using the metaphor: KNOWING IS SEEING, and
brought evidence from diachronic development and from modern uses of verbs with the basic meaning ‘see’ (or similar)
which historically changed or synchronically extend into the meaning ‘know’ (or similar), cf. the examples in (14a) and
(14b), respectively (selected from Sweetser, 1990, chapter 2.3, and Jäkel, 1997, chapter 6.5). In (14c), I have added an exam-
ple from Polish, which shows a split into two forms, by which the verbs gained their autonomous status phonologically and
semantically.
(16) KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor

(a) historical change from Proto-Indo-European *weid ‘see’
English: wise, wit (cf. witness)
Greek: eı̃don ‘see’, perf. oı̃da ‘know’ (cf. English idea)
Irish: fios ‘knowledge’
(b) synchronic extensions
English: I see ‘I understand’, see all sides of the issue, view it differently, see through, look down upon, look up to,
overlook, look forward to, oversee, foresee
(c) phonological split
Polish widzieć ‘see’ and wiedzieć ‘know’ < *weid ‘see’
The ‘seeing’/‘eyes’ metaphor of acquiring knowledge seems to dominate in the world’s languages, but there are also
reports on an alternative model based on the ‘hearing’/’ears’ metaphor as the major pattern. Evans and Wilkins (2000) argue
that in Australian languages, the sensory modality of hearing predominantly serves as a vehicle to the cognitive domain.
Therefore, verbs with the basic meaning ‘hear’ extend to cover meanings associated with thinking and reasoning, such as
‘know’, ‘understand’, ‘remember’, as well as meanings associated with other modalities, such as ‘touching’, ‘smelling’ or
‘feeling’. In languages exhibiting this conceptual model, a lexeme denoting the body part ‘ear’ may extend not only into
the figurative meaning of an ‘instrument’ or ‘tunnel’ through which the outside information is transmitted, but also into a
‘locus’ or ‘container’ in which memories and knowledge are kept, as demonstrated by Gaby (2008) for Thaayorre on the basis
of conventionalized phrases, as well as novel expressions.
Languages which use the ‘seeing’/‘eyes’ metaphor as a basic pattern, may show traces of the ‘hearing’/’ears’ metaphor in
selected expressions. The English phrase I’ve never heard (about something) is typically used in the context of lack of
knowledge (about something) and not actual hearing; analogous phrases, with the same literal and contextual meaning
as in English, are used in other European languages, as well as in many languages spoken elsewhere, for example, in Swahili,
cf. sijapata kusikia ‘I have not heard (about it)’.12 Likewise, languages utilizing the ‘ear’ metaphor as a primary pattern may have
an occasional recourse to the ‘eye’ model (cf. Gaby, 2008). Both metaphorical channels of acquiring knowledge may combine, as
seen in the Persian expression cheshm o gush basteh ‘naive’, lit. ‘ear and eye closed’ (Sharifian, 2011: 204).
Similarly to the cases of grammaticalization discussed in Section 2, it can be argued that the widely attested KNOWING IS
SEEING/HEARING metaphors gradually develop through contextual inference. Lakoff and Johnson assume that the learning of such
primary conceptual metaphors takes place in early childhood through the conflation of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ in such contexts
as: Let’s see what’s in the box (1999: 48, see also the references therein). A language usage perspective offers an alternative
view which attributes the semantic change of verbs with the meaning ‘see’/‘hear’ towards the meaning ‘know’ to small con-
textually-induced modifications along the unidirectionality path: ‘see’ > ‘register’ > ‘realize’ > ‘know’ > ‘understand’. The
unidirectionality here means that a change originates in the contexts where the perception of something ‘seen’ is merely reg-
istered in the brain. The first meaning extension appears in contexts in which the perceived object or event is associated with
some conscious reflection, and later on in contexts in which even more elaborated information processing is involved. The
change reaches a final stage when ‘seeing’ refers to abstract notions that cannot be literally observed. According to the pro-
posed scenario, the English use of the imperative: Look! may represent an initial stage of this verb extension, when looking
implies only the registering of something within the limits of one’s sight. The same verb may represent more semantic
advancement if it is used in the context requiring some action to be taken, as for example, when used as a warning: Look
(out)! or Watch (out)! The new meaning is inferred through the implied contiguity between seeing (the danger), calculating
it and thinking of taking an appropriate action. Using the same reasoning, we can treat the English expression: I see (the prob-
lem) as one of the final stages of the semantic unidirectional development. Many of the less and more advanced semantic
extensions of English verbs of perception are fully conventionalized, which means that a language learner does not repeat
the diachronic development, but simply learns all the meanings in contexts in which they are used. The strong metonymic
connection between visual perception, information processing and memory helps to preserve and entrench the KNOWING IS
SEEING metaphor to the extent that when semantic change takes place with respect to some lexeme(s), a new cycle starts with
novel expressions providing the source domain, as illustrated earlier for English and some other Indo-European data.
Similar stages of gradual development towards more abstraction can be observed in the polysemy of the ‘eyes’ as an
‘instrument of seeing’ and an ‘instrument of understanding’. The following examples have been selected from the Swahili
corpus and all contain expressions with the lexeme jicho ‘eye’. In (17a), the ‘eye’ is construed as an instrument of looking
at things, but the processing of the picture in the mind does not appear very strong. In (17b), the performer of ‘seeing’ pre-
sumably acknowledges the observed woman and registers or recalls some information about her. The object looked at in
(17c) is certainly thought about and invokes desire. The society in (17d) has an ambiguous status of a material, visible object,
but also of an abstract entity. In (17e), it is the abstract contents of the New Testament that the eye analyzes, not the material
letters printed on paper. This is even better highlighted in (17f), where oral literature is ‘looked at’. The final example in (17g)
refers to a fully abstract notion of historical conflicts and arguments recalled from the past and evaluated by jicho ‘eye’ – an
instrument of intellectual analysis.
(17) Swahili examples with jicho ‘eye’

a/ Harakaharaka Asumini aliutupia jicho ule mwezi, lakini haukumwambia wala kumkumbusha chochote juu ya
[. . .] ‘Quickly Asumini looked (lit. threw an eye) at the moon, but it did not tell her or reminded her anything
about [. . .]’
b/ Tuli alimtupia jicho huyo mama. ‘Tuli looked (lit. threw an eye) at that woman.’
c/ Jicho lake limetua kwenye chupa ya wiske. ‘His eye landed at the bottle of whiskey.’
d/ msanii kuwa na jicho kali la kupenya katika jamii yake ili aweze kubuni sanaa itakayosawiri maisha ‘an artist
[must] have a sharp eye [able] to penetrate into his/her society so that (s)he could create art which will picture
the life’
e/ Tukilitupia jicho Agano Jipya, tunaona ya kuwa linatuonyesha hasa upeo wa kweli wa ukristo. ‘If we have a look
(lit. throw an eye) at the New Testament, we can see that it shows us the horizon of the truth of Christianity.’
f/ kuiangalia fasihi simulizi kwa jicho jipya ‘to look at oral literature with a new eye’
g/ Lakini tukiitazama migongano na migogoro ya umma wakati huo, tukitupa macho nyuma na kutazama siku
zilizopita ‘But when we observe the conflicts and arguments of the society of that period, if we have a look (lit.
throw the eyes) back and watch the past days’
12
Note, however, that the direction of change was reverse in Romance languages, e.g. French entendre, Spanish entender, Italian intendere, which extended the
meaning of ‘pay attention’ to ‘hear’ (cf. Sweetser, 1990: 35).
A similar gradual development toward more abstract knowledge could be proposed for the origin of the KNOWING IS HEARING
metaphor. It presumably stems from the pragmatic contexts of telling the news when expressions of the kind: I’ve heard get
reinterpreted as ‘I know’. But it is equally possible to assume that there exist additional pragmatic sources which provide a
strong base for developing the hearing – knowing inference, namely, all kinds of situations when the sounds heard, rather
than the visual signals received, communicate important information about the environment, especially when potential dan-
ger might be involved. It can be hypothesized that in traditional communities, the expressions such as: Have you heard that?
or Listen (to this)! provoked a lot of worry and intellectual work when they were used to refer to likely dangerous circum-
stances of a thunderstorm, wild animals or enemy at night. Therefore, it is not surprising that with two solid independent
sources at its base, the ‘ear’ metaphor of knowledge has become well elaborated in some cultures and languages.
5. Extensions in the domain of social interactions and values
Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) pivotal work has shown that there are many metaphors which societies ‘‘live by’’ and which
are reflected in language. Among such cultural metaphors, those that have an embodied character tend to recur in various
communities and languages independently one from another (Kövecses, 2005, 2010). This is due to the strong metonymic
base which underlies them and which makes them structurally similar to the processes of grammaticalization and other
semantic changes discussed in the previous sections. Due to embodiment, many semantic extensions of body part terms
have similar instantiations in different languages, unrelated genetically or territorially, also in the case of target domains
which relate to the peoples’ ways of life, social institutions and patterns of interaction, symbols, values and beliefs, and var-
ious other concepts covered by the broad term culture. This section discusses some of such recurring extensions and their
motivation.
Extending body part terms onto the domain of kinship relations appears as a particularly common cross-linguistic pat-
tern. I assume that the cognitive processes behind such extensions are largely triggered by the metaphor: KINSHIP RELATION IS
BODY (PART) SHARING. This metaphor has some literary content in it, whether looked upon from the perspective of folk knowledge
of birth and family resemblance, or within the paradigm of modern genetics. The latter has already made its impact on
language and introduced phrases of the kind my genes, meaning ‘my child’, into contemporary speech. Yet, in general, the
conceptualization of kinship is still largely based on more traditional folk models.
In English and many other languages, the vitally important and highly symbolic bodily fluid ‘blood’ provides a vehicle to
conceptualize the notion of kinship, cf. English blood used in the sense of ‘family background, descent’, or the proverb: Blood
is thicker than water. English also demonstrates that the figurative meaning may refer to one’s kin as well, as in the expres-
sion (one’s own) flesh and blood. We can assume that this transfer of meaning – onto a physical domain of one’s close relative
– develops first, and is subsequently followed by a metonymic extension onto an abstract domain of the kinship relation.
Both these figurative meanings of ‘kin’ and ‘kinship’ are conventionalized in other languages, too. The examples below pro-
vide an illustration from Swahili, including two versions of the proverb13 in (18c).
(18) Swahili figurative uses of damu ‘blood’

a/ uhusiano wa kidamu ‘blood (i.e. kinship) relation’
b/ huyu ni damu yangu ‘(s)he is my blood (i.e. child or other close relative)’
c/ Damu nzito kuliko maji (proverb) ‘Blood is thicker than water’
or: Damu (ni damu) si kitarasa ‘Blood (is blood) is not kitarasa (a kind of banana)’
Comparable uses of the lexeme ‘blood’ are found in Polish, cf. wie˛zy krwi ‘ties of blood (i.e. kinship)’, w ich z_ yłach płynie ta
sama krew lit. ‘the same blood flows in their veins’ (i.e. they are related), moja krew lit. ‘my blood’ (about one’s child). In
addition, the words denoting ‘kin/kinship’ derive morphologically from the base krew ‘blood’, cf. krewny ‘kin, relative’ and
pokrewieństwo ‘kinship’. Many other languages exhibit similar extensions of the lexeme ‘blood’ onto the figurative meanings
of ‘kin(ship)’ or lineage, cf. Amharic däm, German Blut, Hausa jini, or Turkish kan.
Other body part terms which tend to symbolize family ties are those denoting the body organs associated with pregnancy
and birth, such as the womb (abdomen, belly), the navel and the umbilical cord. Swahili exhibits conventionalized phrases of
this kind with the lexeme tumbo ‘womb, belly’, e.g. the expression wa tumbo moja lit. ‘of one belly’, which refers to siblings.
Another Swahili lexeme kitovu ‘navel’ is figuratively interpreted as one’s birthplace, metaphorical ‘cradle’ or ‘home’, as in the
expression kwenda kitovuni ‘to go home (birthplace)’ or in the phrase kitovu cha Kiswahili ‘the cradle of the Swahili language’,
but it may also refer to an offspring, as in the proverb: Aliyekula kitovu chako, hatakuachia utumbo ‘The one who ate your
navel will not leave you your intestines’, which alludes to death that spares neither child nor adult.
Many other figurative transfers are based on a metonymic connection between an attribute or a function of a body part,
which in turn serves to derive an abstract sense of a quality or social value. The lexeme ‘hand’ provides one of the most pro-
lific source domains, owing to many physical and symbolic things that hands do and are associated with, which eventually
leads to the development of metaphors such as: POSSESSION IS HAND(S), HELP IS HAND(S), WORK IS HAND(S) or POWER (CONTROL) IS HAND(S). Here
are some expressions illustrating these metaphors in English: to be in somebody’s hands, change hands (possession), give/lend
a hand, hold somebody’s hand (help), make by hand, have one’s hands full (work), lay one’s hands on something, have a hand in
13
All Swahili proverbs in this article are cited after Scheven (1981).
something, take something/someone in hand, get out of hand (power, control). Similar examples can be easily found in other
languages, too, e.g. in Polish, Swahili or Arabic (cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2004a, 2005a; Maalej, 2011).
As in the case of other embodied metaphors discussed earlier, the semantic extension of ‘hand’ proceeds gradually,
according to the well known schema: from concrete to abstract, which is illustrated below with the Polish corpus examples.
The figurative construal of ‘hand’ begins as an instrument of taking/holding a physical object and then extends into a more
abstract notion of possession of material things as well as non-material qualities. This latter, highly abstract concept makes
possible an inference towards even more abstract notions of power and control.
(19) Gradual extensions of Polish re˛ka ‘hand/arm’ (Kraska-Szlenk, 2004a, 2005a)

a/ INSTRUMENT OF TAKING
; brać chleb z koszyczka re˛ka˛ czy widelcem ‘take bread from the basket with the hand or
with the fork’
b/ INSTRUMENT OF HOLDING
; z butelka˛ piwa w re˛ku ‘with a bottle of beer in [his] hand’; z teczka˛ w re˛ku ‘with a
suitcase in [his] hand’
C/ ATTRIBUTE OF POSSESSION
; oddanie ziemi w re˛ce tych, którzy ja˛ uprawiaja˛ ‘giving away the land into the hands of
those who cultivate it’; nabywca miał w re˛kach silny atut ‘the buyer had a strong trump
(argument) in [his] hands’
d/ INSTRUMENT OF POWER/CONTROL
trzymałem w re˛kach 30 tys. ludzkich serc ‘I held 30,000 human hearts in [my] hands’;
prowadzenie aukcji spoczywa w re˛kach aukcjonera ‘leading the auction lies in the
auctioneer’s hands’; on ma nas w re˛ku ‘he has us in [his] hand’
A more complex scenario accounts for another cross-linguistically common metaphor, viz. HONOR (RESPECT, DIGNITY) IS FACE (cf.
Ukosakul, 2003; Yu, 2001, 2008b), which is closely connected to the earlier mentioned metonymy: FACE (FACIAL MANIFESTATIONS)
FOR EMOTIONS. Yu (2001) further argues that the figurative ‘face’ may also stand for a person’s character. This parallels the case
of ‘heart’ which can be construed as a temporary ‘emotion’ or a more permanent state or character, cf. English a good hearted
person or its equivalent in Polish złote serce lit. ‘golden heart’. However, people’s faces constitute important signs in social
interaction not only because they represent emanations of emotions or character traits, but also because they signal and com-
municate to other people the intended messages and attitudes (cf. Wierzbicka, 1999; Yu, 2001). This seems to be the main
reason for the concept of ‘social face’ lying behind the metaphor discussed here, which, as mentioned earlier, is additionally
supported by the metonymic link to embodiment and emotions, as well as by the general schema: GOOD IS UP. People hold their
faces up and show them to other people when they are respectable and have nothing to hide, and they bow down and hide
their faces when they are ashamed. This has widely spread linguistic correlates, cf. English lose face, Arabic waʤh ‘face, respect,
prominent person’, Turkish yüz akɪ ‘honor’ (lit. ‘clear face’), or Swahili sina uso ‘I am ashamed’ (lit. ‘I have no face’).
While the metaphor HONOR IS FACE occurs in many languages and cultures, it seems to be particularly popular in Asia. Yu
(2001, 2008b) observes that the English expression lose face has several Chinese equivalents, e.g. diu-lian ‘lose face’, pao-lian
‘toss face’, quian-lian ‘scrape face’, sao-lian ‘sweep face’. Likewise, multiple expressions correspond to English saving (one’s or
others’) face. Ukosakul (2003: 292) provides similar evidence for the strong entrenchment of this metaphor in the Thai cul-
ture and language, in which numerous expressions with the lexeme nâa ‘face’ construe concepts referring to honor, shame or
timidity. For example, the figurative expressions based on the concept of ‘thick face (like the skin of the sole)’ or ‘hardened
face’ connote a shameless person, while ‘thin face’ is associated with shyness or timidity (Ukosakul, 2003: 290), whereas as
many as nineteen different idioms (e.g. ‘numb/broken/withered face’) can be used to refer to different degrees of emotional
effects of losing honor (Ukosakul, 2003: 292).
Apart from the conventionalized metaphors exemplified above, body part terms are willingly used as a source domain in
various other expressive idioms, clichés as well as proverbs, which carry a figurative message relating to social life and val-
ues. It seems that the embodiment of such expressions contributes to their salience and emotive effect, cf. English figurative
expressions, such as e.g. cut the umbilical cord, contemplate one’s navel, turn/stand something on its head, go belly up, etc. The
following examples of embodied maxims in Swahili provide a small illustration of this trend developed in a culture in which
figurative, indirect speech is highly valued and which has a very rich repository of proverbs. Most examples have a straight-
forward interpretation as to their messages and morals and some have equivalents in English sayings: (20a) corresponds to
When in Rome, do as the Romans do, (20b) to You have made your bed, so you will have to lie in it, (20c) and (20d) are identical to
those in English, (20e) means that war spares no-one, (20f) alludes to the unity of the community, (20g) warns that one
should watch and listen twice before speaking once, and (20h) can be said about someone going into debt to show off.
(20) Swahili proverbs

a/ Ukenda kwa wenye chongo, vunja lako jicho. ‘When you go among one-eyed people, destroy your [own] eye.’
b/ Ndiwe ulotia moto sasa moshi umo machoni mwako. ‘You were the one who started the fire, now the smoke is in
your eyes.’
c/ Asiyekuwapo machoni, na moyoni hayupo. ‘The one who is not in sight (lit. ‘in the eyes’), is not in the heart’
d/ Mapenzi hayana macho ‘Love has no eyes’
e/ Vita havina macho ‘War has no eyes’
f/ Kidole kimoja kikiumia, vidole vingine vyatoa damu. ‘If one finger is hurt, the other fingers are bleeding.’
g/ Binadamu ana macho mawili, masikio mawili na mdomo mmoja ‘Man has two eyes, two ears and one mouth’
h/ Kata pua uunge wajihi. ‘Cut off your nose to mend your face.’
To conclude this section, it is perhaps worthwhile to recall that the world’s major religions evoke embodiment in the form
of symbolic concepts, as in the case of Christ’s body and blood in Christianity, or the concepts of ‘the Prophet’s eye’ and
‘Fatima’s hand’ associated with the protective care of the Prophet Muhammad and his daughter in Islam.
6. External domains
The first and most obvious domain on which human body part terms are transferred is that of the bodies of animals. Even
though various religious and philosophical systems might treat humans and animals as members of one domain, there is no
doubt that on the conceptualization and linguistic level, these two domains are most often separated. Therefore, I assume
that the transfer from humans onto animals involves metaphor and not metonymy, and is based on similarity in the appear-
ance and functions of specific body parts of various species to those of humans.
Some languages seem to follow the rule of transferring human body part nomenclature only onto the body parts of ani-
mals which show remarkable resemblance to people. For example, the Polish terms re˛ka ‘hand/arm’ and noga ‘foot/leg’ can
be used in reference to animals like monkeys, but not to other mammals, such as cats, dogs, wolves, etc., for which łapa ‘paw’
would be used. Likewise, kości ‘bones’ would be used for analogical body parts of many animals, but not fish, for which there
is a specific lexeme ości. Other languages transfer the human nomenclature more freely, also when animals’ body parts are
significantly different from those of people, cf. the Swahili extension mkono wa tembo ‘elephant’s trunk’ lit. ‘elephant’s hand/
arm’ (used as a variation of the specific term mkonga which designates ‘elephant’s trunk’ and nothing else) or mikono ya pwe-
za (ngisi) ‘tentacles’ lit. ‘hands/arms of octopus (squid)’. Many languages extend the word ‘mouth’ in the sense of birds’ ‘beak’,
or human ‘hair’ as animals’ hair, while others keep the two concepts strictly distinct by using separate nomenclature, cf.
Polish: usta ‘mouth’ and dziób ‘beak’, włosy ‘(human) hair’ and sierść ‘(animal) hair’.
Other domains of the metaphoric mapping of body part terms are practically unlimited and may include plants and their
parts, landmarks, human made artifacts, foods and various other objects. Unlike in the metonymy-grounded extensions dis-
cussed in the previous sections, the meaning extension in cases of this kind is unconstrained as to the target domain (pro-
vided some analogy can be made) and is very little constrained by the schemata used in metaphor application, which may be
built on various attributes assigned to particular body parts that are associated with multiple visual aspects or functions of
the same lexemes. For example, the Swahili expression mkono wa ndizi ‘bunch (lit. ‘hand/arm’) of bananas’ is based on the
shape of the ‘hand’ with its fingers, while another extension mkono wa kiti ‘arm of the chair’ evokes the shape of the ‘arm’.
Some cases of such metaphoric extensions may have an additional metonymic support which is available when a target do-
main is adjacent or contiguous to the source domain of the body. For example, the abovementioned Swahili lexeme mkono
may be extended into the meaning of ‘sleeve’, that is a domain related to that of ‘arm’ by contiguity; it may also extend to the
meaning of ‘handle’, which invokes a domain adjacent to that of ‘hand’.
Some representative examples of extensions into other domains have been already mentioned in previous sections of this
article. The metaphoric mapping is typically based on similarity in shape between a certain object and a source body part.
Hence, elongated body parts like ‘arms’ or ‘legs’ serve as sources for elongated objects (parts of objects), cf. English leg of the
table, arm of the chair, and round body parts like ‘head’ or ‘eye’ are used for round objects, cf. English head of golf club
(hammer, needle, cabbage, rose). But the mapping often involves the relative position of the body part with respect to a larger
area of the body, too, hence: ‘heart’ or another inner organ may be used for centered (located inside) objects, cf. heart of the
city, heart of the matter, and ‘eye’ may be mapped on objects which are round and centered, as: eye of the storm or bull’s eye.
Other visual features may also provide a basis for the mapping, for example, in the case of the ‘eye’ it may be its small size, cf.
eye of the potato, or its hollowed shape (i.e. the pupil), cf. eye of the needle, or the fact that it is located in the upper part of
one’s body, cf. eyetooth ‘upper teeth’.
The following Table 2 includes a sample illustration of ‘eye’ extensions similar to those in English in the following lan-
guages: Arabic (Ar) ʕajn, Basque (B) begi (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2012), French (F) oeil and oeillet (diminutive), German (G)
Auge, Indonesian (I) mata (Siahaan, 2011), Polish (P) oko and diminutive oczko, Russian (R) diminutive glazók, Swahili (S)
jicho, Tamil (Ta) kaṇ and Turkish (Tu) göz (see also Brown and Witkowski, 1983 for a cross-linguistically common extension
of ‘eye’ into ‘seed’ and ‘fruit’).
Using the same analogy based on shape, the names of food and dishes often derive from body part terms. We find it odd
and a little repulsive when exposed to such terms in a foreign language, but usually we see nothing wrong with them in our
native tongue. Here are some examples from Polish: uszka (w barszczu) ‘dumplings (in borsch)’ lit. ‘ears-dim.’, paluszki ‘bread
sticks’ lit. ‘fingers-dim.’, oka (w rosole) ‘eyes in broth’, pańska skórka ‘kind of sweet’ lit. ‘master’s skin-dim.’ Usually, it would
be hard to find exact parallels of ‘‘embodied’’ food naming in different languages, since there is a lot of expressiveness in this
area and dishes themselves differ considerably across various cultures, but perhaps the conceptualization of a fried egg
Table 2
Extensions of ‘eye’ into other domains.
Schema Linguistic examples

small, round P oczko ‘gem (in the ring)’, F oeil, P oko (w rosole), ‘eye (in broth)’, G Auge, S jicho (la ua) ‘bud (of flower)’, I mata kaki ‘ankle’,
P oczko, R glazók, Tu göz ‘eye’(on a plant), Ta kaṇ ‘small dot’ (e.g. on a coconut)
small, round, hollowed F oeil, Tu göz, B begi, glazók, Ar ʕajn, G Auge ‘small hole’ (e.g. of the needle, peephole), B ogibegi ‘holes in bread’, gatzabegi
‘holes in cheese’, erlategiren begia ‘hive entrance’, Ta kaṇ ‘mesh’ (of the sieve, net), ‘stitch’, F oeillet ‘small hole’ (e.g.
buttonhole, eyelet’), ‘eye’ (of the needle) P oczko (w pończosze) ‘hole (in the stocking)’
round, shining Ar ʕajn, S jicho la maji, I mata (air), ‘spring’ (of water), Tu göz ‘spring’ (of water) or ‘scale pan’, P oczko wodne ‘little pond (in
the garden)’, P pawie oczko, Ta mayil tōkaiyin kaṇ ‘peacock’s eye’
centered (including G Auge, I mata ‘center’, P oko cyklonu ‘eye of tornado’, Tu göz ‘bridge span’ or ‘drawer, compartment’, e.g. araba gözü ‘glove
abstracts) compartment’, I mata ati ‘innermost feeling or thought’ (lit. ‘eye liver’)
rendered in Swahili as jicho la ng’ombe lit. ‘cow’s eye’ comes close enough to Japanese medamayaki lit. ‘eye-ball-fry’ (Occhi,
2011: 177).
By falling into domains strictly separated from the domain of the human body, semantic extensions discussed in this
section have more autonomous meanings that extensions discussed in Sections 2–4 which, although operate in abstract do-
mains, relate to the human body through some form of metonymy. The semantic autonomy triggers a tendency to separate
such words from their lexical sources by a differentiated form, too. Various strategies can be applied to achieve this goal. The
mentioned earlier examples, as English eye of the needle, mouth of the river, occur with modifiers, others as compounds, cf.
bottleneck, pinhead, still others as morphological derivatives of the body part terms, cf. header, footer. While analyzing body
part terms from a comparative perspective, it would be impossible not to observe a striking regularity that a particular
extended meaning encoded by a body part term alone in one language happens to be encoded as a more complex linguistic
unit based on the equivalent body part term in another language. For example, a language like Polish, which has rich nominal
morphology, often uses derivatives in the place of Swahili polysemous words, cf. Swahili mkono ‘hand/arm’, ‘handle’, ‘sleeve’,
and Polish re˛ka ‘hand/arm’, ra˛czka ‘handle’, re˛kaw ‘sleeve’, or Swahili kichwa ‘head’, ‘head (of lettuce), ‘headline’, and Polish
głowa ‘head’, główka ‘head (of lettuce)’, nagłówek ‘headline’. The abovementioned differences have important consequences
for lexical representations of body part terms in the context of polysemy and language usage, but a thorough discussion of
these issues goes beyond the scope of this article. It is worthwhile to point out, however, that the Swahili and Polish exam-
ples mentioned above parallel the differences between English and Czech (and Russian) analyzed by Janda (2011). Defining
the concept of metonymy in word-formation, Janda says: ‘‘In lexical metonymy, the source is the concept usually associated
with the word that is uttered, the target is the meaning actually accessed, and the context is the remainder of the utterance.
In word-formation, the source corresponds to the source word that the derivation is based on, the context for the metonymic
relationship is the affix, and the target is the concept associated with the derived word’’ (2011: 360). As some of the Polish
examples demonstrate, the word-formation processes may involve metonymy (e.g. re˛kaw ‘sleeve’), but also metaphor
(e.g. główka ‘head of lettuce’).
Similar differentiation of forms is also observed in the case of extensions in another external domain, namely, that of
grammaticalization. As well known, grammaticalized forms often undergo phonological reduction, also referred to as erosion,
due to their high frequency and high context-predictability (cf. Bybee, 2011). But there are reasons to believe that the auton-
omy of the grammatical meaning constitutes another important factor in this change because, unlike in other cases of pho-
nological reduction which starts in the most frequent forms and diffuses on others, the diffusion of the reduced form onto the
non-grammaticalized contexts does not take place. It also happens that the two forms become differentiated by other means
than reduction. For example, in the following case in Polish: na czele ‘at front’ (e.g. of a parade) and na czole ‘on the forehead’
the phonological split is caused by the fact that the former, grammaticalized expression continues the historical form, while
the latter is analogical (cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2007: 43).
7. Language-specific semantic extensions and cultural models
In addition to the common patterns of conceptualizations, brought to attention in the previous sections, languages exhibit
semantic extensions of body part terms which are quite unique and which manifest themselves in linguistic expressions and
idioms, as well as in the exceptional structure and semantic compositionality which cannot be found elsewhere. Such lan-
guage-specific extensions predominantly arise in the domain of culture or, more specifically, in the domains of cultural
behaviors, beliefs and artifacts which are unique to a certain linguistic community and which are not shared by others.
For example, the earlier mentioned concepts of the Prophet’s eye and Fatima’s hand have numerous cultural and linguistic
instantiations in various Muslim communities and are not shared by other communities. Another well known example
related to the embodiment and bodily expressions is that of the theory of humors and the four temperaments in ancient
and medieval Europe, which led to a system of widespread beliefs in folk culture. The theory influenced the conceptualiza-
tions of emotions (cf. Geeraerts and Grondelaers, 1995), but also many other concepts related to the domains of health and
diseases, physical appearance and behavior, cf. the modern uses of such English words as spleen, bloody, phlegmatic, whose
figurative senses go back to that cultural inheritance.
As pointed out by many authors (e.g. Kövecses, 2005, 2010), cultural interpretations may override universal tendencies
conditioned by embodiment, as in the following example of Thaayorre. Gaby (2008: 40) observes that Thaayorre speakers
conceptualize shame by reference to body hair rising and not by reference to a flushed face as English speakers do, who
in turn associate hair standing on end with terror and not shame. Embodied extensions may also differ as to their linguistic
instantiations. The fact that various languages share the same body-based metaphors does not automatically mean that all of
them will express these metaphors using exactly the same wording, and we expect similarity in this respect rather than
identical glossing. Much of the language we speak is based on prefabricated, conventionalized expressions and figurative
meanings are no exception here. Hilpert (2006) observes that the English phrases: keep an eye on and have an eye on are both
motivated in their meaning of ‘paying attention’, but only the latter may refer to ‘wanting’, while the former may not. Such
differences are expected to be found in one language as well as across languages.
Unpredictable semantic change is particularly favored in expressive language whose fundamental nature consists in non-
obvious collocations and compositionality. Examples of nontransparent idioms with body part terms abound in various lan-
guages, cf. English: cost an arm and a leg, play it by ear, chin wag, shout one’s head off; Polish: wyssać z palca ‘tell a made-up
story’ (lit. ‘suck out of the finger’), gumowe ucho ‘informer, telltale’ (lit. ‘rubber ear’); or Swahili kichwamaji ‘silly person’ (lit.
‘water(ly) head’), mkono wa birika ‘miser’ (lit. ‘hand/handle of the teapot’). As the above examples illustrate, various body
part terms may serve as source domains to construe figurative concepts of many kinds. However, vulgar terms referring
to intimate body parts seem to be particularly privileged in such expressive usage, at least in some cultures and languages.
Polish, for example, has numerous conventionalized phrases with the word dupa ‘ass’. Some of them, for instance, those in
(21) below, apparently lack any logic. In fact, the less logic they follow, the more expressive and humorous they seem to be,
making the semantic development of such lexemes very irregular.
(21) Polish phrases with dupa ‘ass’

a/ dupa Jasiu i skrzypce ‘ass, Johnny and the violin’ (about something impossible/untrue)
b/ jak pół dupy zza krzaka ‘like a half-ass from behind a bush’ (about wearing non-matching clothes)
c/ rozmowa jak z dupa˛ o północy ‘conversation as if with the ass at midnight’ (about difficulties in communication)
d/ jak z koziej dupy tra˛bka ‘as [if] the goat’s ass [could be] a trumpet’ (about something unfit)
Cognitive Linguistics has always underlined the role of culture in shaping language structure and a lot of attention has
been paid to examining the ‘cultural models’ through their reflections in various linguistic expressions analyzed by means
of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. This methodology has been successfully applied to research on lexical categories,
including body part terms, which mirror and reveal the cultural metaphors that have shaped them (see especially the edited
volumes containing the data from various languages, e.g. Sharifian et al., 2008; Maalej and Yu, 2011). Yu (2001) illustrates
the connection between embodiment, language and culture by means of a triangle-shaped figure (see Fig. 1). The bottom of
the triangle (point A) stands for the shared knowledge of the body which provides a basis for embodied linguistic structure.
The upper line between points D and E represents cultural differences between communities which also have impact on
language. No matter how different the two languages may be (the distance between points B and C represents such a
difference), there will always be parallel linguistic expressions grounded by embodiment and distributed along the
line AF.
Yu’s model can be combined with a usage-based approach and quantitative measures. Various parameters can be consid-
ered for the purpose of a semasiological analysis of body part terms in one language, as well as for contrastive studies, such
as, for example, collocations of body part terms with other words and their frequencies, a number of diversified linguistic
expressions of a particular conceptual metaphor, or a number of different senses of a body part term and their relative fre-
quencies. Such quantitatively measured usage criteria determine how strongly a particular cultural model is represented in
one language and show the differences and similarities among multiple languages.
One conventional expression which reflects a certain way of conceptualization associated with a specific cultural model
certainly indicates that there existed at some point of time a link between this cultural model and a linguistic community
speaking the language in question. However, a single linguistic datum of this sort does not tell us much about how lively or
dead the link is at the present time. But the existence of similar, less conventionalized or quite novel expressions based on
the same cultural model provides a clear proof that it is still well entrenched and active in the language and in the commu-
nity. The corpus data make it possible to observe language use in this respect and to distinguish between past and present
cultural models within a speech community by analyzing the type and token frequencies of specific metaphors and expres-
sions. If a particular metaphor or metonymy has various linguistic instantiations of different frequencies of occurrence, it
most likely indicates that a cultural model is still alive, whereas even a high token frequency of one specific expression
may point out only to cultural inheritance, likely to be ‘dead’ at the present time. Using such evidence, we can determine
that the metaphor COURAGE IS HEART is still very active in Swahili, but not in Polish, in which it has remained as a relic in limited
linguistic expressions of low frequency, while diachronic evidence points out that it was much more entrenched in the past
(cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2005a). By the same token, the earlier discussed metaphor HONOR IS FACE has a very strong entrenchment in
Asian languages such as Chinese or Thai, but lower entrenchment in languages such as English, Polish or Swahili even though
the same metaphor is revealed in selected infrequent expressions.
Fig. 1. Embodiment–language–culture triangle (Yu, 2001).
At the same time, it should be pointed out that while a strong linguistic entrenchment of a certain metaphor/metonymy
naturally correlates with its strong cultural value,14 the reverse does not have to be true, because the same cultural values may
be expressed by different, alternative conceptualizations. For example, the value of work can be expressed by either of the
embodied metonymies: HAND(S) FOR WORK or SWEAT FOR WORK. Some languages, including Polish and Swahili, have linguistic expres-
sions instantiating both of these metonymies. But a thorough comparison reveals that the former is very well entrenched in
Polish, but not in Swahili, while the latter is marginal in Polish and strongly grounded in Swahili (cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2004a,
b). The evidence is based on differences in the corpus occurrences of appropriate linguistic expressions and the number of prov-
erbs and prefabs revealing each of these metonymies, but we can also observe that a chain of further semantic extensions of the
former metaphor is more elaborated in Polish than in Swahili, while Swahili has a strongly elaborated chain of extensions of the
latter metonymy, which is quite absent in Polish.
The following figures demonstrate yet another method of comparison. Fig. 2 illustrates the proportions of corpus frequen-
cies of particular senses of the lexeme ‘heart’ in Polish and Swahili indicating how different in fact these lexemes are in their
overall semantic networks in spite of having similar extended meanings and expressions (cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2005a,c). Fig. 3
shows proportional differences between the same two languages with respect to the senses associated with the domains of
‘taking’, ‘giving’ (including more abstract extended senses) and with physical ‘movement’ of the lexeme ‘hand/arm’
(cf. Kraska-Szlenk, 2004a, 2005a, for differences with respect to other senses).
The dynamics of cultural models can also be observed in the case of language transfer within a community. Sharifian
(2011) offers a thorough discussion of such cultural transfers from original Australian languages onto Australian English
within the Aboriginal communities, proving without any doubt that the conceptual structures are also mapped, and not only
linguistic expressions.
Various languages also exhibit the adoption of cultural models through the medium of linguistic calques. Within the
domain of body part terms, the word heart has cherished the most spectacular career of this kind due to the adoption of
the Christian notion of Sacred Heart as well as various other metaphorical meanings of the word ‘heart’ found in the Bible
and left in their literal translations in innumerable languages. While in the Aboriginal case mentioned above, the cultural
model is cross-linguistically transferred within the same community, the transfer of the cultural model in this case imposes
linguistic extensions in the languages of other communities which adopt a new culture.
Language contact provides numerous examples of calquing new phrases with a foreign cultural model embedded in them.
Many of such adoptions proceed with no significant effect on a target language or culture of the community. However, it is
interesting to observe that expressions based on a strong cognitive motivation seem to be adopted with extreme ease. This
can be observed in the post-communist era in Poland (after 1989), when the Polish language has been under a lot of influ-
ence of Western popular culture and under a massive attack of English in the form of various kinds of borrowing, including
linguistic calques. Some English expressions with body part terms have entered the Polish language, too, but only those
which are based on transparent metaphoric and metonymic extensions. For example, the following two English expressions
have been literally calqued into Polish in recent years and have become so popular that we can talk about borrowing already
having taken place: Eng. have (something) at the back of (somebody’s) mind > Pol. mieć (coś) z tyłu głowy lit. ‘have (something)
at the back of the head’, Eng. butterflies in the stomach > Pol. motyle w brzuchu (as in English). Non-transparent English idioms,
such as, for example, to cost an arm and a leg, to have a leg up (on somebody), are not calqued and there is no indication that
they will be. The reason for that is quite straightforward: neither universal conceptualization nor cultural reasons provide a
mechanism through which such idiomatic expressions could be mapped onto the linguistic structure of Polish.
14
This point has been made clear by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) with respect to many metaphors that are ‘‘lived by’’ in the American society, e.g. TIME IS MONEY or
ARGUMENT IS WAR, and by many authors since then, including the references mentioned earlier in this article.
df=6, χ2=70,59; p value < 0,00001 (highly significant)
Fig. 2. Frequencies of different senses of Polish serce and Swahili moyo ‘heart’.
df=3, χ2=125,53, p value < 0,0001(highly significant)
Fig. 3. Frequencies of different senses of Polish re˛ka and Swahili mkono ‘hand/arm’.
The modern, globalized world makes the cross-cultural transmission of conceptualization models very easy even without
direct person-to-person contact, since it has at its disposal the media of books, cinema, television, or the Internet. Still, it is
worthwhile to realize that large parts of the world were globalized, or at least connected through various kinds of networks
in the past, too, facilitating the spread of human thought from one community to another. This happened in the case of the
aforementioned humoral theory and its bodily metaphors which expanded within large areas of Europe and the Middle East,
while the spread of Christian and Muslim religions made their embodied symbols well-known all over the world.
In conclusion of this section, I would like to bring to attention a quite marginal but fascinating example of language con-
tact and adoption of a new conceptualization model, which took place in Swahili via borrowing from Sanskrit, through the
medium of oral literature.
It is well known that Sanskrit Panchatantra stories (c. 4th century) were adopted by the Arabs as Kalila wa Dimna and
mostly from that source (although perhaps also through direct contact with the Indian community), they spread along
the Swahili East African Coast. One of these stories, known in Swahili as Punda wa dobi ‘The washerman’s donkey’, is still
popular. The oldest known Swahili version of the story can be found in Steere’s (1870) oral tradition collection and was told
to the author by Khamis bin Abubekr on the island of Zanzibar. Khamis’s version is remarkably similar in its overall content,
as well as in many details, to the story of the donkey named Lambakarna found in Panchatantra. The two stories also share
the same final moral which is based on the idea that the donkey did not have the heart and the ears, and that is why it was
foolish and had not learnt from the previous experience. The story’s message is immediately understood on the grounds of
the Sanskrit language, in which manas ‘heart’ (as well as its contemporary Hindi reflex man) is conventionalized as a met-
aphorical locus of wisdom and intelligence. As to the ears, the metaphor KNOWING IS HEARING is also conventionalized in Sanskrit,
supporting the inference of the ears as an instrument of understanding and learning.15 However, none of these extended
meanings associated with the organs of ‘heart’ and ‘ears’ occurs in Swahili, which conventionally utilizes the metaphor KNOWING
15
I am grateful to my colleagues Joanna Jurewicz and Filip Ruciński for confirming these claims and providing the Sanskrit and Hindi terms.
IS SEEING (based on the organ of the eyes) and associates the organ of the heart with the figurative meaning of the locus of feelings,
courage and memory, but not that of knowledge and cognition. In spite of this, the story was told and understood within the
Swahili community in the past and it still is, even though the inference about the donkey’s lack of reason can be made exclu-
sively from the overall situational context and only then the missing organs of the donkey are understood in their metaphorical
sense, extended by means of universal cognitive mechanisms and implemented into the Swahili language and culture as a
statistically very insignificant (practically found in this narrative only) alternative model of moyo ‘heart’ and masikio ‘ears’.
As this and the previous examples of language contact show, the detailed studies of languages based on diversified linguistic
material provide access to vast cultural influences which are worth recognizing and analyzing, even though they may occur
quite marginally in a language under description.
8. Conclusion
The analysis of semantic extensions of body part terms undertaken in this article has shown remarkable cross-linguistic
convergence in conceptualization and lexical transfer in multiple domains, such as, grammaticalization, emotions, cognition,
social relations, and others. By recognition of this patterning and explaining it in terms of two major cognitive processes,
namely, metaphor and metonymy, the study contributes to the line of research on regularity of semantic change
(e.g. Williams, 1976; Sweetser, 1990; Bybee et al., 1994; Heine, 1997; Evans and Wilkins, 2000; Traugott and Dasher,
2002; Heine and Kuteva, 2007). It complies with approaches which argue that language universals have an emergent char-
acter and derive from general human cognitive capacities and experience, and from linguistic embodiment (e.g. Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980, 1999; Tomasello, 1999, 2003; Croft, 2003; Evans and Levinson, 2009). The body part terms analyzed in this
article provide numerous examples of such emerging universals considered either from the perspective of cognitive
processes, as illustrated in (23a–b) below, or with respect to lexicon, as demonstrated in (23c–d).
(23) Examples of embodied emerging universals

a/ metaphors:
LOCUS OF EMOTIONS IS HEART/LIVER/STOMACH
KNOWING IS SEEING/HEARING
KINSHIP RELATION IS BODY (PART) SHARING
b/ metonymies:
FACE (FACIAL MANIFESTATIONS) FOR EMOTIONS
HEART/LIVER/STOMACH FOR EMOTIONS
HAND(S) FOR POSSESSION, HAND(S) FOR HELP
c/ lexicon:
major body part terms, e.g. ‘head’, ‘eye(s)’, ‘hand (hand/arm)’, ‘heart’
d/ directionality of semantic extension
‘head’ > ‘top’; ‘container for thoughts’ > ‘wisdom’; ‘important person’
‘hand’ > instrument of ‘possession’ > ‘power’ > ‘control’
‘heart’ > ‘inside’, ‘center’; ‘container for emotions/thoughts’ > ‘emotions’
While investigating universal patterns under a coarse-grained analysis, the article also demonstrates the importance of
linguistic detail when cultural input and usage tradition in particular languages are taken into account. It has been argued
that the following three aspects: cognitive universal abilities, culture, and usage, must be recognized simultaneously in order
to examine each language’s specific embodied ‘model’. Different methodologies, based on corpus studies, have been sug-
gested as possible ways of examining complex interaction patterns within a single language and for the purpose of compar-
ative studies. The research of the past decades has cherished a particular interest in linguistic embodiment and exploration
of the connection between language, culture and the human body. It is thus hoped that this first attempt of looking at cross-
linguistic convergence in semantic extension of body part terms and the preliminary results of the present study will be of
interest and will be supported by future research in similar directions.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my colleagues, Matthias Brenzinger, Bernd Heine, Nina Pawlak and Iza Will, who kindly read and com-
mented on earlier drafts of this article, as well as two anonymous Language Sciences’ reviewers. I would like to thank the
audience of the conference The Body in Language held in Warsaw on the 21–22 October 2011, where some of the material
included here was first presented. I am obliged to the persons who kindly provided or verified linguistic data for me: Samuel
Angelile (Swahili), Nina Pawlak and Iza Will (Hausa), Kamila Stanek (Turkish), Joanna Jurewicz and Filip Ruciński (Sanskrit
and Hindi), and Karolina Łaszewska (Tamil). I also wish to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Warsaw
and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (the grant no N N104 387640).
References
Abinet Sime Gebreyes, in press. Grammaticalization of body part terms in Ethiosemitic. In: Matthias, Brenzinger, Iwona, Kraska-Szlenk (Eds.), The Body in
Language: Comparative Studies of Linguistic Embodiment. Brill, Leiden.
Aksan, Mustafa, 2011. The apocalypse happens when the feet take the position of the head: Figurative uses of ‘head’ and ‘feet’ in Turkish. In: Maalej,
Zouheir, Ning, Yu. (Eds.), Embodiment via Body Parts: Studies from Various Languages and Cultures. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp.
241–255.
Ameka, Felix K., 1995. The linguistic construction of space in Ewe. Cogn. Linguist. 6–2 (3), 139–181.
Andersen, Elaine, 1978. Lexical universals of body-part terminology. In: Greenberg, Joseph H. (Ed.), Universals of Human Language, vol. 3: Word Structure.
Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 335–368.
Barsalou, Lawrence W., 2008. Grounding symbolic operations in the brains modal systems. In: Semin, Gün R., Smith, Eliot R. (Eds.), Embodied Grounding:
Social, Cognitive, Affective, and Neuroscientific Approaches. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 8–42.
Basso, Keith H., 1967. Semantic aspects of linguistic acculturation. Am. Anthropol. 69, 471–477.
Berendt, Erich A., Tanita, Keiko, 2011. The ‘heart’ of things: a conceptual metaphoric analysis of heart and related body parts in Thai, Japanese and English.
Int. Assoc. Intercultural Commun. Stud. 20 (1), 65–78.
Bergen, Benjamin, Lau, Ting-Ting Chan, Narayan, Shweta, Stojanovic, Diana, Wheeler, Kathryn, 2010. Body parts representations in verbal semantics. Mem.
Cogn. 38 (7), 969–981.
Brown, Cecil H., 1976. General principles of human anatomical partonomy and speculations on the growth of partonomic nomenclature. Am. Anthropol. 3,
400–424.
Brown, Cecil H., 2011a. Finger and hand. In: Matthew S. Dryer, Martin Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max
Planck Digital Library. Chapter 130. Available at: <http://wals.info> (accessed on 2013-03-03).
Brown, Cecil H., 2011b. Hand and arm. In: Matthew S. Dryer, Martin, Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max
Brown, Cecil H., Witkowski, Stanley R., 1981. Figurative language in a universalist perspective. Am. Ethnol. 8 (3), 596–615.
Brown, Cecil H., Witkowski, Stanley R., 1983. Polysemy, lexical change, and cultural importance. Man 18 (1), 72–89.
Bybee, Joan, 2007. Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Bybee, Joan, 2011. Usage-based theory and grammaticalization. In: Heiko, Narrog, Bernd, Heine (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, pp. 69–78.
Bybee, Joan, Perkins, Revere, Pagliuca, William, 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. University of
Chicago, Chicago/London.
Cablitz, Gabriele H., 2008. ‘‘When ‘‘what’’ is ‘‘where’’: a linguistic analysis of landscape terms, place names and body part terms in Marquesan (Oceanic,
French Polynesia). Lang. Sci. 30, 200–226.
Comrie, Bernard, 2011. Numeral bases. In: Matthew S. Dryer, Martin, Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max
Croft, William, 2000. Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. Longman, Harlow, Essex.
Croft, William, 2003. Typology and universals, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Croft, William, Cruse, D. Alan, 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Cuyckens, Hubert, Zawada, Britta (Eds.), 1997. Polysemy in Cognitive Linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Damstra, Boeken Renee, 1987. Zogenamd, zogeheten: voornamen in het dagelijks leven. BZZTôH, Den Haag.
Deignan, Alice, Potter, Liz, 2004. A corpus study of metaphors and metonyms in English and Italian. J. Pragmatic. 36, 1231–1252.
Enfield, N.J., Wierzbicka, Anna (Eds.), 2002. The body in description of emotion: cross-linguistic studies. Pragmatic. Cogn. 10 (1/2) (special issue).
Evans, Nicholas, Levinson, Stephen C., 2009. The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behav. Brain Sci.
32, 429–492.
Evans, Nicholas, Wilkins, David, 2000. In the minds ear: the semantic extensions of perception verbs in Australian languages. Language 76 (3), 546–587.
Evans, Vyvyan, 2006. Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning-construction. Cogn. Linguist., 491–534.
Evans, Vyvyan, Tyler, Andrea, 2004. Spatial experience, lexical structure and motivation. In: Radden, Günter, Panther, Klaus-Uwe (Eds.), Motivation in
Grammatical and Lexical Structure. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 157–192.
Gaby, Alice, 2006. The Thaayorre ’true man’: Lexicon of the human body in an Australian language. In: Asifa, Majid, Nick J. Enfield, Miriam van Staden (Eds.),
Language Sciences, vol. 28/2–3 (special issue), pp. 201–220.
Gaby, Alice, 2008. Gut feelings: Locating intellect, emotion, and life force in the Thaayorre body. In: Sharifian, Farzad, Dirven, René, Ning, Yu, Niemeier,
Susanne (Eds.), Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs across Cultures and Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/
New York, pp. 27–44.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Grondelaers, Stefan, 1995. Looking back at anger: cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. In: Taylor, John R., MacLaury, Robert E.
(Eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World. Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 153–179.
Gibbs Jr., Raymond W., 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Goossens, Louis, 2002. Metaphtonymy: the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. In: Dirven, René, Pörings, R. (Eds.),
Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 159–174.
Heine, Bernd, 1997. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford.
Heine, Bernd, 2011a. Grammaticalization in African languages. In: Narrog, Heiko, Heine, Bernd (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford
Heine, Bernd, 2011b. The human body as a template in the evolution of grammar. Plenary address at Body in Language: Lexicon, Metaphor, Grammar, and
Culture; University of Warsaw, 21 October 2011.
Heine, Bernd, in press. The Body in Language: Observations from Grammaticalization. In: Matthias Brenzinger, Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Eds.), The Body in
Language: Comparative Studies of Linguistic Embodiment, Brill, Leiden.
Heine, Bernd, Reh, Mechthild, 1982. Patterns of Grammaticalization in African Languages. Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Köln.
Heine, Bernd, Ulrike, Claudi, Friederike, Hünnemeyer, 1991a. From cognition to grammar: evidence from African languages. In: Traugott, Elizabeth C., Heine,
Bernd (Eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization. Vol. 1: Focus on Theoretical and Methodological Issues. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp.
149–187.
Heine, Bernd, Claudi, Ulrike, Hünnemeyer, Friederike, 1991b. Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Heine, Bernd, Kuteva, Tania, 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Heine, Bernd, Kuteva, Tania, 2007. The Genesis of Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hilpert, Martin, 2006. Keeping an eye on the data: metonymies and their patterns. In: Stefanowitsch, Anatol, Gries, Stefan Th. (Eds.), Corpus-Based
Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 123–152.
Hollenbach, Barbara E., 1995. Semantic and syntactic extensions of body-part terms in Mixtecan: the case of ‘face’ and ‘foot’. Int. J. Am. Linguist. 61, 168–
190.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide, 2012. The importance of unveiling conceptual metaphors in a minority language: the case of Basque. In: Anna Idström, Elisabeth
Piirainen (Eds.) in cooperation with Tiber F. M. Falzett, Endangered Metaphors. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 253–273.
Jäkel, Olaf, 1997. Metaphoren in abstrakten Diskurs-Domänen: Eine kognitiv-linguistische Untersuchung anhand der Bereiche Geistestätigkeit, Wirtschaft
und Wissenschaft. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main.
Janda, Laura A., 2011. Metonymy in word-formation. Cogn. Linguist. 22 (2), 359–392.
Johanson, Lars, 2011. Grammaticalization in Turkic languages. In: Narrog, Heiko, Heine, Bernd (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford
Johnson, Mark, 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, 2008. Approaching lexical typology. In: Vanhove, M. (Ed.), From Polysemy to Semantic Change: Towards a Typology of Lexical
Semantic Associations. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 3–52.
Kövecses, Zoltán, 2000. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture and the Body in Human Feeling. Cambrigde University Press, Cambridge.
Kövecses, Zoltán, 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambrigde University Press, Cambridge.
Kövecses, Zoltán, 2010. Metaphor and culture. Acta Univ. Sapientiae Philol. 2 (2), 197–220.
Kövecses, Zoltán, Radden, Günter, 1998. Metonymy: developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cogn. Linguist. 9 (1), 37–77.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2004a. Leksem re˛ka w je˛zyku polskim w porównaniu do mkono w suahili. In: Pawlak, Nina, Podobińska, Zofia (Eds.), Je˛zyki Afryki a
kultura. AGADE, Warszawa, pp. 174–199.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2004b. Metaphorical uses of Swahili lexeme jasho ‘sweat’. Studies of the Department of African Languages and Cultures, University of
Warsaw, Warsaw, pp. 34, 43–57.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2005a. Metaphor and metonymy in the semantics of body parts: a contrastive analysis. In: Górska, Elzbieta, _ Radden, Günter (Eds.),
Metonymy-Metaphor Collage. Warsaw University Press, Warszawa, pp. 157–175.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2005b. The semantic network of Swahili moyo ‘heart’: a corpus-based cognitive analysis. Studies of the Department of African
Languages and Cultures, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, pp. 37, 47–80.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2005c. Serce w polskim i moyo w suahili w metaforach wyrazaja _ ˛ cych emocje. In: Duszak, Anna, Pawlak, Nina (Eds.), Anatomia
szcze˛ścia: emocje pozytywne w je˛zykach i kulturach świata. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa, pp. 137–146.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2007. Analogy: The Relation Between Lexicon and Grammar. LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 38. LINCOM Europa,
München.
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona, 2009. Emotional aspects of inversion in Swahili address terms. In: Pawlak, Nina (Ed.), Codes and Rituals of Emotions in Asian and
African Cultures. Warszawa, Elipsa, pp. 110–127.
Kraska-Szlenk, I., in press. Extending body-part terms in the domain of emotions. In: M. Brenzinger, I. Kraska-Szlenk (Eds.), The Body in Language:
Comparative Studies of Linguistic Embodiment, Brill, Leiden.
Lakoff, George, 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1980. Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, New York.
Langacker, Ronald W., 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Langacker, Ronald W., 1991. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.
Langacker, Ronald W., 2006. On the continuous debate about discreteness. Cogn. Linguist. 17 (1), 107–151.
Langacker, Ronald W., 2009. A dynamic view of usage and language acquisition. Cogn. Linguist., 627–640.
Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, 2003. Syntactic and semantic development of body part prepositions in Valley Zapotec languages. In: Jeanie Castillo (Ed.).
Proceedings from the Sixth Workshop on American Indigenous Languages. Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, vol. 14. pp. 69–82.
Maalej, Zouheir, 2008. The heart and cultural embodiment in Tunisian Arabic. In: Sharifian, Farzad, Dirven, René, Ning, Yu, Niemeier, Susanne (Eds.),
Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs across Cultures and Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 395–
428.
Maalej, Zouheir, 2011. Figurative dimensions of 3ayn ‘eye’ in Tunisian Arabic. In: Maalej, Zouheir, Ning, Yu (Eds.), Embodiment via Body Parts: Studies from
Various Languages and Cultures. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 213–240.
Maalej, Zouheir, Yu, Ning (Eds.), 2011. Embodiment via Body Parts: Studies from Various Languages and Cultures. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Matsuki, Keiko, 1995. Metaphors of anger in Japanese. In: Taylor, John R., MacLaury, Robert E. (Eds.), Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World.
Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 137–151.
McPherson, Laura, Prokhorov, Kirill, 2011. The use of liver in Dogon emotional encoding. In: Batic, Gian Claudio (Ed.), Emotional Encoding in African
Languages. LINCOM Studies in African Languages 84. LINCOM: Europa, Munich, pp. 38–55.
Newman, John, Rice, Sally, 2004. Patterns of usage for English SIT, STAND and LIE: a cognitively inspired exploration in corpus linguistics. Cogn. Linguist. 15–3,
351–396.
Niemeier, Susanne, 2000. Straight from the heart – metonymic and metaphorical explorations. In: Barcelona, Antonio (Ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the
Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Mouton de Gruyter, The Hague, pp. 195–213.
Niemeier, Susanne, 2008. To be in control: Kind-hearted and cool-headed. The head-heart dichotomy in English. In: Sharifian, Farzad, Dirven, René, Ning, Yu,
Niemeier, Susanne (Eds.), Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs across Cultures and Languages. Berlin/New York,
Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 349–372.
Norde, Muriel, 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Occhi, Debra J., 2011. A cultural-linguistic look at Japanese ‘eye’ expressions. In: Maalej, Zouheir, Ning, Yu (Eds.), Embodiment via Body Parts: Studies from
Various Languages and Cultures. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 171–193.
Palmer, Gary B., 1996. Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. University of Texas Press.
Pawlak, Nina, 2001. Diachronic typology of locative phrases in Chadic. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, vol. 16. Rüdiger Köppe, Köln, pp. 355–385.
Pawlak, Nina, 2010. Je˛zyki afrykańskie [African Languages]. WUW, Warszawa.
Pawlak, Nina, in press. Notions for SELF in Hausa. In: Matthias Brenzinger, Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Eds.), The Body in Language: Comparative Studies of
Linguistic Embodiment, Brill, Leiden.
Peirsman, Yves, Geeraerts, Dirk, 2006. Metonymy as a prototypical category. Cogn. Linguist. 17 (3), 269–316.
Radden, Günter, 2000. How metonymic are metaphors. In: Antonio, Barcelona (Ed.), Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. A Cognitive Perspective.
Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 93–108.
Radden, Günter, Kövecses, Zoltán, 1999. Towards a theory of metonymy. In: Panther, Klaus-Uwe, Radden, Günter (Eds.), Metonymy in Language and
Thought. Amsterda/Philadelphia, John Benjamins.
Rakova, Marina, 2002. The philosophy of embodied realism: a high price to pay? Cogn. Linguist. 13 (3), 215–244.
Rieschild, Verna R., 1998. Lebanese reverse role vocatives. Anthropol. Linguist. 40 (4), 617–641.
Robert, Stéphane, 1997. From body to argumentation: grammaticalization as a fractal property of language. Berkeley Linguistics Society 23S,
116–127.
Rohrer, Tim, 2007. Embodiment and experientalism. In: Cuyckens, Hubert, Geeraerts, Dirk (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford
Sandra, Dominiek, Rice, Sally, 1995. Network analyses of prepositional meaning: Mirroring whose mind – the linguist’s or the language user’s? Cognitive
Linguistics 6 (1), 89–130.
Scheven, Albert, 1981. Swahili Proverbs. University Press of America, Waszyngton.
Schladt, Mathias, 2000. The typology and grammaticalization of reflexives. In: Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Curl, Traci S. (Eds.), Reflexives: Forms and Functions.
Typological Studies in Language 40. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 103–124.
Sharifian, Farzad, 2011. Cultural Conceptualizations and Language. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Sharifian, Farzad, Dirven, R., Yu, N., Niemeier, S. (Eds.), 2008. Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs across Cultures and
Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.
Siahaan, Poppy, 2008. Did he break your heart or your liver? A contrastive study on metaphorical concepts from the source domain organ in English and in
Indonesian. In: Sharifian, Farzad, Dirven, René, Ning, Yu, Niemeier, Susanne (Eds.), Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body
Organs across Cultures and Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 45–74.
Siahaan, Poppy, 2011. HEAD and EYE in German and Indonesian figurative uses. In: Maalej, Zouheir, Ning, Yu (Eds.), Embodiment via Body Parts: Studies
from Various Languages and Cultures. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 93–113.
Siakaluk, Paul D., Pexman, Penny M., Dalrymple, Holly-Anne R., Stearns, Jodie, Owen, William J., 2011. Some insults are more difficult to ignore: the
embodied insult Stroop effect. Lang. Cogn. Process. 26 (8), 1266–1294.
Steen, Gerard J., 2007. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Steere, Edward, 1870. Swahili Tales as Told by the Natives of Zanzibar. Bell and Daldy, London.
Svorou, Soteria, 1986. On the evolutionary paths of locative expressions. Berkeley Linguistics Society 12, 515–527.
Svorou, Soteria, 1994. The Grammar of Space. Typological Studies in Language 25. Benjamins, Amsterdam, Philadelphia.
Sweetser, Eve E., 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Szczygłowska, Tatiana, in press. Selected body part terms as a means for conveying abstract concepts in The Economist: The case of head, eye, mouth and
nose. In: Matthias Brenzinger, Iwona Kraska-Szlenk (Eds.), The Body in Language: Comparative Studies of Linguistic Embodiment, Brill, Leiden.
Tomasello, Michael, 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Tomasello, Michael, 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth C., 1988. Pragmatic strengthening and grammaticalization. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society, pp. 406–416.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, Dasher, Richard B., 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ukosakul, Margaret, 2003. Conceptual metaphors motivating the use of Thai ‘face’. In: Casad, Eugene H., Palmer, Gary B. (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics and
non-Indo-European Languages. Cognitive Linguistics Research 18. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York, pp. 275–303.
Vainik, Ene, 2011. Dynamic body parts in Estonian figurative descriptions. In: Zouheir Maalej, Ning Yu (Eds.). pp. 41–70.
Wierzbicka, Anna, 1999. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wierzbicka, Anna, 2007. Bodies and their parts: an NSM approach to semantic typology. Lang. Sci., 14–65.
Wilkins, David, 1996. Natural tendencies of semantic change and the search for cognates. In: Durie, Mark, Ross, Malcom (Eds.), The Comparative Method
Reviewed. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, pp. 264–304.
Williams, Joseph M., 1976. Synaesthetic Adjectives: A Possible Law of Semantic Change. Language 52 (2), 461–478.
Witkowski, Stanley R., Brown, Cecil H., 1985. Climate, clothing, and body-part nomenclature. Ethnology 24 (3), 197–214.
Wołk, Ewa, 2008. Towards the Conceptualization of the Sphere of Interpersonal Relations in Amharic. Warsaw University Press, Warszawa.
Yu, Ning, 2001. What does our face mean to us? Pragmatic. Cogn. 9 (1), 1–36.
Yu, Ning, 2002. Body and emotion: body parts in Chinese expression of emotion. Pragmatic. Cogn. 10 (1-2), 341–367.
Yu, Ning, 2007. Heart and cognition in ancient Chinese philosophy. J. Cogn. Cult. 7, 27–47.
Yu, Ning, 2008a. The Chinese heart as the central faculty of cognition. In: Sharifian, et al. (Eds.). pp. 131–168.
Yu, Ning, 2008b. Metaphor from body and culture. In: Gibbs, R.W. (Ed.), The Cambridge Book of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, pp. 247–261.
Yu, Ning, 2009. From Body to Meaning in Culture: Papers on Cognitive Semantic Studies of Chinese. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Language Sciences: Iwona Kraska-Szlenk

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Language Sciences: Iwona Kraska-Szlenk

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Language Sciences 44 (2014) 15–39

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Semantic extensions of body part terms: common patterns

1.1. The embodiment hypothesis

⇑ Tel.: +48 225520517

1.2. Theoretical assumptions

2. Extension of body part terms in grammaticalization

(1) Hausa (Pawlak, 2010: 275-276):

BP term Extension Language examplesa

(2) Amharic (Abinet, in press):

(3) Unidirectionality principle (Heine et al., 1991a: 158):

(4) Amharic (Abinet, in press):

(5) Wolof (Robert, 1997: 117):

(6) Sources of reflexive markers (Schladt, 2000: 108)

(7) Hausa (Pawlak, in press):

(8) Api (Heine, 1997: 21):

(9) Zulu (Heine, in press):

(10) Mandarin (Comrie, 2011)

3. Semantic extensions in the domain of emotions8

(11) LOCUS OF EMOTIONS IS HEART

(13) Chinese (Yu, 2002: 344)

(15) DEAR PERSON IS EYE

4. Extensions in the domain of knowledge and reasoning

(16) KNOWING IS SEEING metaphor

(17) Swahili examples with jicho ‘eye’

5. Extensions in the domain of social interactions and values

(18) Swahili figurative uses of damu ‘blood’

(19) Gradual extensions of Polish re˛ka ‘hand/arm’ (Kraska-Szlenk, 2004a, 2005a)

(20) Swahili proverbs

Schema Linguistic examples

7. Language-specific semantic extensions and cultural models

(21) Polish phrases with dupa ‘ass’

Fig. 1. Embodiment–language–culture triangle (Yu, 2001).

df=6, χ2=70,59; p value < 0,00001 (highly significant)

df=3, χ2=125,53, p value < 0,0001(highly significant)

(23) Examples of embodied emerging universals

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen