The polysemy of body part terms in Hausa within the frame of Image Schemas
Keywords:
body part, compositional polysemy, semantic extension, metonymy, HausaAbstract
Body part-terms have been identified as a productive source of figurative lexical meanings as well as grammatical meanings (Heine, et al. 1991). The paper adopts descriptive lexical semantics as a model of approach. This paves the way to examine the relationships that exist between different interpretations of words. Virtually, every language exhibits rich set of semantic extensions of body part-terms, highlighting the importance of the human body for lexical and grammatical structure (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Most meaning extensions of body part-terms can be shown to have a clear motivation through either metaphor or metonymy, as has been argued in many studies before (Allan, 1995). The paper provides a rich inventory of body part-terms in Hausa and interprets the variety of their meanings in terms of conceptualization patterns.
References
Allan, K., 1995, “The anthropocentricity of the English word(s) back”, Cognitive Linguistics 6-1, 11-31.
Behrens, L., 1999. “Aspects of polysemy”, in: D. A. Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M. Job. P. R. Lutzeier (eds.), Lexicologie – Lexicology, vol. 1, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Bilkova, I. 2000, Czech and English Idioms of Body Parts: A view from cognitive semantics, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Glasgow.
Croft, W., Cruise, D.A., 2004, Cognitive Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deignan, A. and Potter L., 2004, “A corpus study of metaphors and metonymies in English and Italian”, Journal of Pragmatics 36/7, 1231-1252.
Delano, O., 1958, Atumo ede Yoruba. Short dictionary and grammar of the Yoruba language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dirven, R., 2002, “Metonymy and metaphor: Different mental strategies of conceptualization”, in: R. Dirven, R. Pörings (eds.), Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast, Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 75-111.
Fillmore, C.J., Atkins, B.T.S., 2000, “Describing polysemy: The case of crawl”, in: C. Livestock (ed.), Polysemy: Theoretical and computational approaches, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 91-110.
Gbadegesin, S., 2003, “Eniyan, The Yoruba concept of a person”, in: P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux (eds.), The African Philosophy Reader (2nd ed.), 175-191. (The study originally appeared under the same title in: Gbadegesin, S., 1991, African Philosophy: Traditional Yoruba philosophy and contemporary African realities, New York: Peter Lang, 27-59).
Heine, B., Claudi U., Hünnemeyer F., 1991, Grammaticalization: A conceptual framework, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Hilpert, M., “Chained metonymies in lexicon and grammar: A cross-linguistic perspective on body-part terms”, in: G. Radden et. al. (eds.) Constructing meaning, Amsterdam: John Benjamins (to appear).
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., 2006, “Cross-linguistic Polysemy in Tactile Verbs”, in: J. Luchjenbroers (ed.), Cognitive linguistics investigations across languages, fields, and philosophical boundaries, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 235-253.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., 1991, Polysemy and metaphor in per-ception verbs: A cross-linguistic study, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Edinburgh.
Lakoff, G., 1987, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Cate-gories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lakoff, G., Johnson M., 1980, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: Chi-cago University Press.
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books.
Niemeier, S., 2000, “Straight from the heart metonymy and metaphorical explanations”, in: A. Barcelona (ed.), Metaphor and metonymy at the crossroads. A cognitive perspective, Berlin: Mouton de Guyter, 195-213.
Oladipo, O., 1992, “The Yoruba conception of a person: An analytical philosophical study”, International Studies in Philosophy, 24, 3, 15-24.
Pawlak, N., 2005,“Conceptualization of “thinking” and “speaking” in Hausa”, in: E. Górska, G. Radden (eds.), Metonymy-Metaphor Collage, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 121-142.
Petho, G., 1999, What is polysemy? A survey of current research and results, Hungary: Department of German linguistics, University of Debrecen.
Radden, G. and Kövecses Z.,1999, “Towards a theory of metonymy”, in: K.U. Panther and G. Radden (eds.) Metonymy in language and thought, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 17-19.
Radden, G., 2001, “The folk model of ‘language’”, Metaphorik.de, 1, 80-86.
Yu, N., 2001, “What does our face mean to us?”, Pragmatics & Cognition, 10 (1/2), 341-367.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2013 University of Warsaw Press
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The SALC is a BOAI-compliant open access journal. The journal content is freely available on the journal website. All journal content appears on the licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of the first publication, the work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Authors are required to sign and send copies of Article Publishing Agreement and Fields of Exploitation statement prior to article's publication.
