Culture, Body, and Language: Conceptualizations of Internal Body Organs Across Cultures and LanguagesFarzad Sharifian 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. |
Contents
Locating intellect emotion and life force | 27 |
he break your heart or your liver? A contrastive study | 45 |
English heart | 75 |
The conceptualization of internal organs | 103 |
The Chinese heart as the central faculty of cognition | 131 |
What it means to the Japanese speakers | 169 |
How to have a HEART in Japanese | 191 |
An indigenous perspective | 213 |
Conceptualizations of del heartstomach in Persian | 247 |
Expressions concerning the heart libbā in Northeastern | 267 |
Hearts and angry minds in Old English | 319 |
Kindhearted and coolheaded | 349 |
The case of Dutch | 373 |
The heart and cultural embodiment in Tunisian Arabic | 395 |
Index | 429 |
Copyright | |