Cultural Conceptualizations of the face and the cheek(s) in Serbian and English: A Corpus-Based Study

Starting from the argument that human experiences may result in both universal and culture-specific metaphors and that embodiment is interrelated with culture and cognition (Kövecses in Metaphor in culture: universality and variation. Cambridge University Press, 2005; Sharifian in Cultural lnguistics. John Benjamins, 2017; Yu in The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press, 2008), this chapter examines image schemas as well as metaphorical and metonymic mappings associated with parts of the human body in two languages. The main aim of this research was to explore the relationship between cultural conceptualizations underpinning the lexemes ‘face’ (Serb. lice) and ‘cheek’ (Serb. obraz) in Serbian and English in order to see how these conceptualizations are encoded in these two typologically and genealogically distant languages and cultures. In addition to that, the aim was to identify the embodiment of emotion concepts that relate to these conceptualizations. The research was based on qualitative corpus and contrastive analysis. The data for the study was collected from several corpora: dictionaries, a web-based database of newspapers in Serbian and English and corpora of conversational language in order to identify typical patterns of language use. The goal was to have an insight into the way linguistic expressions containing the lexemes ‘face’ and ‘cheek’ are used in order to identify prototypical cultural conceptualizations in these two languages. The analysis was done using the analytical tools and theoretical framework of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian in Cultural linguistics. John Benjamins, 2017). The results of the analysis indicate similarities and differences related to conceptualizations of these body parts in these two languages, typical cultural conceptualizations and language practice.