engleski

The constructional approach to “hand” and “leg” in English

The human body is one of the few domains of the everyday life perceived and coded by all languages of the world. According to the embodiment hypothesis, the universal physical experience is one of the bases for the way cognition and language are structured. The latter is reflected, among other things, in the fact that body part terms are universally polysemic and involved in various idioms. Such linguistic properties of lexemes denoting parts of the body are both the consequence and the proof of the metaphorical and metonymical nature of language. In this paper, I analyse the polysemy and idioms of hand and leg in English on the examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and compare them to the ways the same body part terms are coded in some unrelated languages. My presupposition, which I aim to prove, is that metaphor, metonymy and body-part polysemy and idiomaticity are linguistically universal.

body part terms; embodiment; metaphor; metonymy; motivation; polysemy; idioms

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