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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 16:2 (2018) ► pp.317–347

Health metaphors and embodiment in Arab economic discourse

| Adam Mickiewicz University

This article is a corpus-based study that examines selected economic metaphors in Arabic with a view to ascertaining whether their presence in a non-Indo-European language can be explained in terms of universal embodied cognition. When exploring the relationship between certain bodily experiences and the corresponding metaphorical expressions in Arabic this paper addresses the following research questions: (1) What is the role of embodiment in Arab economic discourse? (2) Is Arab economic discourse in any way similar to its English counterpart? (3) If so, could any of these similarities be due to the influence of English? (4) If so, does that pose a challenge to the embodiment hypothesis?

Keywords: Arabic, health metaphors, embodiment, economic discourse, influence of English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metaphor research in cognitive linguistics
  • 3.Corpus, methodology and data
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1 economy is a suffering organism
    • 4.2 economy is a recovering organism
    • 4.3 economy is a healthy organism
  • 5.The influence of English?
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00014.dom
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