The Polysemy of Body Part Terms in Hausa within the Frame of Image Schemas

• Authors: Tijjani Shehu Almajir
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

body parts; compositional polysemy; semantic extension; metonymy; Hausa

• Publisher: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
• Journal: Studies in African Languages and Cultures
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 47
• Pages: 93-111

Dates

published

2013-12-10

Contributors

author

Tijjani Shehu Almajir

• Bayero University, Kano

Identifiers

ISSN

0860-4649