Publications

Publication details [#55995]

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2012. The importance of unveiling conceptual metaphors in a minority language. The case of Basque. In Idström, Anna and Elisabeth Piirainen, eds. Endangered Metaphors. (Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 2). John Benjamins. pp. 253–274.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

This paper studies some (external and internal) body-part related conceptual metaphors in Basque, a language isolate spoken on the Western Pyrenees, and discusses the importance and relevance of such a study for endangered languages in general and Basque in particular. The goal of this paper is twofold: (i) to show that culture plays a fundamental role in the analysis of conceptual metaphors, since all metaphors are not ‘universal’ despite the claim that they share a common embodied grounding, and (ii) to prove that conceptual metaphor is a critical tool in the study of endangered languages, Basque in this case, because it unveils certain conceptualizations that are deeply entrenched in the language and that are sometimes overshadowed by a globalized and ethnocentric viewpoint.