Phraseological units involving body-part terms: a corpus based analysis of Hausa to English translation
Phraseological units involving body-part terms: a corpus based analysis of Hausa to English translation

Author(s): Yakubu Magaji Azare
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: phraseology; body-part terms; grammaticalization; cultural metaphors; Hausa
Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the comparison of structures involving body-part terms in one language and their equivalents in another. The analysis is based on examples extracted from three novels published in both Hausa and English versions. Ten items representing the terms for body parts (mouth, stomach, head, back, front, hand/arm, eye, ear(s), leg/foot, heart) were checked in the parallel texts and compared in terms of their lexical equivalency. The analysis revealed important differences between the two languages in the use of body-part terms. A significantly higher number of body-part terms in the Hausa text than in its English counterpart is motivated by structural properties of the Hausa language in which these terms are involved in coding grammatical relations; it also has reference to the patterns of conceptualization in which body-part terms have various semantic extensions and metaphoric functions.

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