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Article published In:
Emotion, Body and Mind across a Continent: Figurative representations of emotions in Australian Aboriginal languages
Edited by Maïa Ponsonnet, Dorothea Hoffmann and Isabel O'Keeffe
[Pragmatics & Cognition 27:1] 2020
► pp. 240–271

Ear and belly in Warlpiri descriptions of cognitive and emotional experience

| The University of Queensland
| The University of Western Australia

Like most other Australian languages, Warlpiri – a Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngumpin-Yapa group – is rich in figurative expressions that include a body-part noun. In this article we examine the collocations involving two body parts: langa ‘ear’, which mostly relates to cognition; and miyalu ‘belly’, which mostly relates to emotion. Drawing on an extensive Warlpiri database, we analyse the semantic, figurative and syntactic dimensions of these collocations. We note how reflexive variants of certain collocations impose a non-literal aspectual reading, as also observed in Romance and Germanic languages inter alia. The article also highlights differences between the range of body-based emotion metaphors found in Warlpiri, and that reported for the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia. We hypothesize that these differences sometimes reflect grammatical differences. In particular, Warlpiri allows body-part nouns in syntactic functions that rarely found in non-Pama-Nyungan languages, due to the prevalence of body-part noun incorporation in the latter group.

Keywords: figurative language, metaphors, body parts, emotion, cognition, reflexive constructions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some Warlpiri grammatical background
    • 2.1The language and its speakers
    • 2.2Part-whole syntax
    • 2.3The semantics of reflexive constructions
  • 3. Langa ‘ear’
    • 3.1The syntax of langa ‘ear’ collocations
  • 4. Miyalu ‘belly’
    • 4.1Tropes operating at noun-phrase level
    • 4.2Tropes at clause level
      • 4.2.1Body part for emotion
      • 4.2.2Container metaphor
      • 4.2.3Accessibility metaphor
      • 4.2.4Speech metaphors
      • 4.2.5Perception metaphors
      • 4.2.6Harm metaphors
    • 4.3Reflexive constructions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations not included in the Leipzig glossing rules
  • References
Published online: 22 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.00016.lau
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