Semantic Extension of HEAD in Korean and Thai: A Contrastive Perspective

Abstract

Modern linguistic traditions have witnessed increasing attention to embodied cognition, culture, and typology. Embodiment is responsible for the universalities of human experience as reflected in language, due to similarities in human cognitive processes such as metaphor and metonymy. Many crosslinguistic studies corroborate the claims of similar cognitive mechanisms operating behind ontological divisions, conceptual networks, construal of events, semantico-functional change of lexemes, among others. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals an array of differences in their operations, largely attributable to culture-specific idiosyncrasies and/or typological dissimilarities, hence the significance of crosslinguistic and comparative investigations. Based on the established cognitive-linguistic theoretical frameworks, this research analyzes the semantic extension of a conceptually prominent body-part term HEAD in Korean (meli and taykali) and in Thai (hǔa) from a comparative perspective. HEAD is among the most perceptually-prominent and functionally-essential body parts, and thus it constitutes a convenient and effective reference point for analyzing embodiment. A comparative investigation reveals commonalities and differences in the conceptualization of HEAD and its semantic extension scenarios, which merit the attention of researchers of cognitive linguistics, linguistic typology, and comparative/contrastive linguistics. This study shows that, most notably, Korean favors contour-based conceptualizations (HEAD is ROUND; HEAD is UNIT), whereas Thai favors horizontal-axis-based conceptualizations (HEAD is FRONT; HEAD is BEGINNING). Furthermore, Korean has multiple lexemes with specialized meanings, including one for animal heads, a reflection of the monosemy strategy of lexicalization, which is in contrast with the polysemy structure in Thai. The multiplicity of HEAD lexemes in Korean is partly responsible for the emergence of pejorative meanings.