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Cultural Conceptualisations of mouth, lips, tongue and teeth in Bulgarian and English

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Advances in Cultural Linguistics

Part of the book series: Cultural Linguistics ((CL))

Abstract

The chapter elaborates on ‘an embodiment via body parts’ analysis of mouth and its meronymy in two typologically distinct and genealogically distantly related languages, Bulgarian and English. Adopting a Cultural Linguistics framework, the analysis focuses on figurative expressions as ‘rich points’ and delves into the specificities of figurativity underwriting the linguistic data as parts of flexible cultural conceptualisations. The analyses based on frame semantics target a discussion of the diversity of metaphors and metonymies involving mouth, lips, tongue and teeth in the languages of the two cultural groups. It transpires that in English communication as embodied by the mouth and its meronymic components are conceptualised as socially and individually regulated activity, involving premeditation and self-reflection, while in Bulgarian the embodiment of communication suggests a more leisurely and unselfconscious interactive behaviour. The analysis proper is preceded by specification of the conceptual and analytical tools employed within the general comprehensive framework of Cultural Linguistics as an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to meaning in human life and is followed by a prospectus concerning viable venues for future research.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I express my gratitude to an anonymous reviewer to whom I owe the analysis in terms of dynamicity. According to the said reviewer it is the exchange precisely that is profiled in Bulgarian (and other Slavic languages for that matter e.g. Pol. z ust do ust ‘from mouth to mouth’), while in English prominent are the less dynamic Instrument and Channel, encoded via by.

  2. 2.

    Polytrope is used here as employed by Shore (1996) and Friedrich (1991) to identify cases in which it is extremely difficult to tease apart metaphors and metonymies and specify where metonymy stops and metaphor takes up in the chain of figurative transpositions. In Cognitive Linguistics the term metaphthonymy (Goossens 2003) has gained wider use in labelling instances of polyfunctional patterns of figurativity where the exact sequencing of metaphor and metonymy cannot be determined. The two terms are used interchangeably in the chapter.

  3. 3.

    Chain metonymies and a series of metonymies are not coterminous. The former defines the case of single frame-based metonymies that correlate naturally, while the latter defines the presence of different metonymies not causally or naturally related in the same expression.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Alexandra Bagasheva

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  1. Alexandra Bagasheva
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Correspondence to Alexandra Bagasheva .

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  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Farzad Sharifian

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Bagasheva, A. (2017). Cultural Conceptualisations of mouth, lips, tongue and teeth in Bulgarian and English. In: Sharifian, F. (eds) Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Cultural Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_10

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