Abstract:
The abundant and systematic presence of metaphor in language has in particular been
explored by departing from the embodied nature of many metaphors. In the current
research we investigate the manner in which the concept EATING in two nonrelated
languages, namely Afrikaans (a Germanic language) and Northern Sotho (a Bantu
language) gives rise to metaphorical expressions in these two languages. The two
notions of cultural model and metaphor form the cornerstones of our research. The
basic question guiding our research is whether the metaphorical mappings originating
from the same source domain (EATING) onto various target domains are the same in
the two languages and secondly, whether there is any evidence that differences – if any
– are culturally motivated.
Our study is corpus-based. Lexical items belonging to the source domain of eating were
used as search nodes in our corpus search. Our analysis indicates that the
metaphorical source domain – target domain mappings in the two languages show a
large amount of overlap. As far as the metaphors that we identified are concerned,
remarkable similarities and very few - and these not significant - differences were found.
