Metaphors and the human body

Abstract

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) call attention to the fact that metaphors constitute an elemental part of everyday language use. They propose that instead of single metaphorical expressions, cognitive structures in the mind must be considered in metaphor research. The meanings of metaphorical expressions can be deduced on the bases of conceptual metaphors that can have several linguistic realizations across the source domain and the target domain. The human body is an ideal source domain to conceptualize non-literal meanings in languages. In this paper I compare 197 Hungarian and Italian body metaphors in an attempt to answer the question whether these two languages use the same body metaphors or if they represent wholly different conceptualizations.