Contrastive study of the metaphor and metonymy driven semantic extensions of the body part word hand “手 ” in chinese and japanese language

Human  body  has  relatively  recently  been  acknowledged  the  role  in human  conceptualisation.  Many  of  the  basic  bodily  experiences  get projected  onto  different  spheres  of  human  life  via  two  basic mechanisms of thought, metaphor and metonymy, with a sole purpose of  facilitating  human  understanding  of  the  world.  In  this  paper  we investigate the metaphoric and metonymic extensions of one body part word, HAND, in Chinese and Japanese language. The aim of this study is, firstly, to point out the  main  mechanisms that govern the semantic extensions of the word HAND towards other cognitive domains in both languages.  Secondly,  the  contrastive  study  we  present  here  aims  to show  the  similarities  and  differences  that  exist  between  these  two languages both on the level of cognitive mechanisms and on the level of their  surface  language representations. Basic comparison with the two Indo-European languages, English and Serbian, given at the end of this paper  contributes  to  the  hypothesis  that  some  of  the  cognitive mechanisms could have a universal status in human languages.

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contrastive analysis ,

cognitive mechanisms metaphor metonymy mapping ,

meaning extension ,