Schedule 80. StuTS

Many conceptual metaphors originate directly or indirectly from bodily experience (see Sullivan 2017, Gibbs 2017). However, even though having a body is a shared human experience everywhere, metaphors involving the human body are not universal across all languages (see, e.g., Yu 2007, Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013, Gibbs 2017). Rather, research on Basque, Mandarin Chinese and Australian Indigenous languages indicates that body metaphors are often culturally specific to some extent (see Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013, Yu 2007, Evans & Wilkins 2000). This shows the importance both of including underrepresented languages in cognitive linguistic research and of integrating their respective cultural context into the analyses (see also Rice 2017 for an overview of the contributions of Indigenous language research to the field of cognitive linguistics). Conceptual metaphors involving body part vocabulary are also found in Taruma, a highly endangered and as of yet undescribed Indigenous language of Guyana (see Eberhard et al. 2025): examples include doya ada ‘house head’, i.e., ‘roof’, or achirahĩ ‘think’ being derived from achi ‘eye’. Following Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), these can be analyzed as A HOUSE IS A BODY and as COGNITION IS VISUAL PERCEPTION, respectively. The study proposed here is a qualitative exploration of conceptual metaphors in Taruma colexificatons and lexical items derived from body part terms. The aim is to categorize the semantic domains that feature in body part metaphors, and to attempt to provide some socio-cultural context for these mappings.
The data for this research stems from my fieldwork with the Taruma, which included word list elicitation as well as recordings of culturally significant topics. The vocabulary elicitation was based on the Intercontinental Dictionary Series, which includes 22 semantic domains (Key & Comrie 2023). The lexical items were then entered into a FLEx database (SIL International 2025), which currently comprises approximately 950 entries, in preparation for a Taruma dictionary. Despite the comparatively low number of lexical items, the variety of semantic domains included in the data nevertheless makes it possible to show tendencies regarding conceptual metaphors in body part vocabulary: in colexifications, the domains appearing most frequently relate to the natural world, such as plants or landscape features, and to items from everyday life, such as tools. In derived words, the body serves as source for emotions and cognition. This shows that in Taruma, the human body constitutes a central source domain used to make sense of the environment, both natural and man-made, while also being used to form words for cognitive processes like thinking. While this reflects tendencies common in many languages (see, e.g., Tjuka 2024 for a systematic analysis of body-object colexifications in 396 language varieties), the exact mappings in Taruma are also influenced by sociolinguistic and historical factors, such as the speakers’ Taruma-Wapichan bilingualism, as some of the colexifications are the same in Wapichan.