The Semantics of Eating in Afrikaans and Northern Sotho: Cross-linguistic Variation in Metaphor

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.

Notes

¹ It is worth noting that Wierzbicka (2009) does not consider “eat” and “drink” to be universal human concepts. She bases her reasoning on the fact that the concepts are not lexicalized as two separate words in Kalam (a Papuan language) and Warlpiri (an Australian language).

² In present-day South Africa, Coloured is not considered offensive and is preferred by the people designated as such.