The pragmatic implications of metonymical body-based idioms in Jordanian Arabic

We report a study of the metonymical idioms that incorporate body parts, exploring the role that body parts have in motivating different aspects of metonymical meaning in Jordanian Arabic. The study discusses a number of metonymy-based idioms that include lexis for parts of the body, showing that such idioms underlie and help structure our understanding of concepts and experiences in the world. The conceptual “intra-domain” mapping examined in this study underlies Jordanian people’s use and understanding of conventional idioms such as red-haired, blue-eyed, long-necked, strong-backed, broken-backed, thin-skinned, long-handed, etc. The paper demonstrates how rich the human body is in terms of being a source domain for metonymies. Also, all the conventional idioms reported in this study are to be viewed as clear-cut examples of metonymies, as used in Jordanian Arabic.