Abstract:

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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