Body Part Terms In Conceptualization And Language Usage

The volume focuses on body part terms as the vehicle of embodied cognition and conceptualization. It explores the relationship between universal embodiment, language-specific cultural models and linguistic usage practices. The chapters of the volume add to the previous research in a novel way. The presentation of original data from previously undescribed languages spoken by small communities in Africa and South America allows to discover unknown aspects of embodiment and to propose new interpretations. Well-known languages are analyzed from a new perspective relying on the benefits of linguistic corpora. Contrastive and theoretically oriented studies help to pinpoint similarities and differences among languages, as well as tendencies in conceptualization patterns and semantic development of the lexis of body part terms. The volume contributes to the field of linguistics, but also to cognitive science, anthropology and cultural studies.

This volume is based on the theme session titled 'Embodiment via Body Parts', organized by Zouheir Maalej, Farzad Sharifian, and Ning Yu at the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference held in Krakow, Poland, in July 2007.

The Body in Language: Comparative studies of Linguistic Embodiment provides new insights into the theory of linguistic embodiment in its universal and cultural aspects. The contributions of the volume offer theoretical reflections on grammaticalization, lexical semantics, philosophy, multimodal communication and - by discussing metaphorization and metonymy in figurative language - on cognitive linguistics in general. Case studies contribute first-hand data on embodiment from more than 15 languages and present findings on the body in language in diverse cultures from various continents. Embodiment fundamentally underlies human conceptualization and the present discussions reveal a wide range of target domains in conceptual transfers with the body as the source domain.

This volume is the first book publication which focuses on conceptualization and polysemy of ‘eye’. It encompasses a wide variety of languages to evidence cross linguistic similarities and differences in the semantic extensions of the eye.

This book comprises 20 chapters that have been divided into two distinct parts: language in educational contexts and language in cultural contexts. The contributions included in this book are the outcome of the conference Contacts and Contrasts that was held in Konin, Poland, in 2021 (C&C2021). The contributions featured in the first part of the part of the book focus on various issues in the field of applied linguistics, in particular language education, second and foreign language learning as well as translator training. The second part of this edited collection features chapters devoted to a range of issues at the intersection of semantics, historical and contact linguistics, as well as literature.

Research on the “embodiment hypothesis” within cognitive linguistics and beyond is growing steadily aiming to bridge language, culture, and cognition. This volume seeks to address the question regarding what specific roles individual body parts play in the embodied conceptualization of emotions, mental faculties, character traits, cultural values, and so on, in various cultures, as manifested in their respective languages. It brings together some linguistic evidence that sheds light on the embodied nature of human cognition from languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, Estonian, German, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish. The studies in this volume also show how embodiment is mediated in those languages through such cognitive mechanisms as metonymy and metaphor.

One of the central themes in cognitive linguistics is the uniquely human development of some higher potential called the "mind" and, more particularly, the intertwining of body and mind, which has come to be known as embodiment. Several books and volumes have explored this theme in length. However, the interaction between culture, body and language has not received the due attention that it deserves. Naturally, any serious exploration of the interface between body, language and culture would require an analytical tool that would capture the ways in which different cultural groups conceptualize their feelings, thinking, and other experiences in relation to body and language. A well-established notion that appears to be promising in this direction is that of cultural models, constituting the building blocks of a group's cultural cognition. The volume results from an attempt to bring together a group of scholars from various language backgrounds to make a collective attempt to explore the relationship between body, language and culture by focusing on conceptualizations of the heart and other internal body organs across a number of languages. The general aim of this venture is to explore (a) the ways in which internal body organs have been employed in different languages to conceptualize human experiences such as emotions and/or workings of the mind, and (b) the cultural models that appear to account for the observed similarities as well as differences of the various conceptualizations of internal body organs. The volume as a whole engages not only with linguistic analyses of terms that refer to internal body organs across different languages but also with the origin of the cultural models that are associated with internal body organs in different cultural systems, such as ethnomedical and religious traditions. Some contributions also discuss their findings in relations to some philosophical doctrines that have addressed the relationship between mind, body, and language, such as that of Descartes.