Speakers
Description
he semantics of body part nouns is particularly fascinating from the point of view of the evolution of word meanings, their metaphorical and metonymic derivation and, from a cross-linguistic standpoint, for the large amount of overlap between different languages. The status of BODY as a semantic prime, especially in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (cf. Wierzbicka, 2014; 2007) has never been challenged by recent studies in lexical semantics. In combination with further NSM primitives such as the relational substantive PART and space substantives such as BELOW and SIDE, BODY is the fundamental building block of complex semantic units such as ARM, HEAD, NECK, EYE etc. Wierzbicka (2007, p. 15) argues that “the domain of the human body is an ideal focus for semantic typology and, […], cognitive anthropology, because the body is, almost certainly, a conceptual […] universal. […] despite a good deal of variation in the lexical details, everywhere in the world people appear to think about the human body in terms of certain parts […].” The “good deal of variation” makes this topic an interesting testing ground for lexicography. Intralinguistic analysis, especially when supported by historicaltypological evidence, highlights a productive area of pprox.ngnio pprox.ngn which appears difficult to pinpoint. The cognitivist perspective helps us to better grasp the mechanisms of conceptualization and reasoning behind this phenomenon. As pointed out by Manerko (2014) in a study of idiomatic expressions in English, cognitive modelling of the human body involves the classification of its parts along a restricted number of topological classes which may integrate different image schemas, e.g., the ‘container’ one (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Cross-linguistic analysis reveals common paths of pprox.ngnion and pprox. ngn that sometimes extend beyond the concrete, basic meaning of a word. It also provides crucial insights into the phraseology of body part nouns in view of their lexicographic treatment. The phraseological expressions at the core of the study are word combinations with a relatively high degree of fixedness and partly non-compositional meaning. The nouns we would like to discuss in the three languages Italian, English and German are mano/hand/Hand and braccio/arm/Arm because of the wide overlap of concrete and abstract meanings. Partial equivalences between further nouns will also be mentioned. Our case study starts from constructionist and phraseological-constructionist lexicological studies carried out on different languages in the quest for shared syntactic-semantic features in the creation of phraseological expressions centred on body part nouns (cf. Ganfi et al., 2023). A lexicological analysis focusing on the semantic relations that involve various body part nouns in their different phraseological manifestations, e.g., SPATIAL ORIENTATION and POSSESSION in the case of hand, provides a baseline for an in-depth understanding of the pprox.ngnion processes that may apply to different phraseologisms, even across languages, and offers a methodological foundation for their lexicographic treatment. The application of specific semantic relations as well as of generic image schemas to the treatment of phraseological expressions, in particular of idioms, in a lexicographic resource is treated with reference to the dictionary model named Phrase-based Active Dictionary (PAD) (cf. DiMuccio-Failla & Giacomini, 2022), which is part of PhraseBase, an integrated lexical information system for language learners made up of a lexicographic, an ontological and a grammatical component. After presenting the microstructure of a PAD, we will show which positions within a lexicographic entry are dedicated to the description of idioms, especially when a non-compositional phraseological meaning coexists with a literal (compositional) meaning (e.g., to get your hands on something). We will also illustrate which semantic-pragmatic indications are provided to the ideal user (an advanced learner) regarding these expressions. The case study highlights, from a cross-linguistic angle, the influence of cognitive processes in determining the complex semantic properties of phraseology related to body part nouns. In general, we argue that this type of knowledge, which is assumed to play a significant role in almost any semantic field, should be explicitly made available to dictionary users (cf. Ostermann, 2015), especially non-native speakers, and that it should be conveyed by means of verbal and non-verbal contents.
