Culture as Reflected in Somatic Idioms

Abstract

The aims of this paper are threefold: first, to analyse the ways in which culture is reflected in idioms; second, to discuss the role of body-part words in idioms; third, to determine the differences and similarities between the English and Georgian somatic idioms on the basis of a contrastive analysis. The somatic idioms play a special role in the formation of cultural specifics. This is due to the universal functions assigned to the somatic terms and their reference field. Somas are the semantic centres of idioms of various languages, including English and Georgian. Idioms with somatic centres may be considered as the virtual units containing information on non-verbal actions of a person and their emotions. From a general perspective, the universal feature of all languages is that the phraseology, as a cultural concept, is developed and fixed in the lexicon through communication. Multiword units express intellectual and affective meanings in the language. The idioms with soma-centres attest that many phraseologisms are semantically universal and have equivalents in other languages, in the present study, in Georgian and English. They sometimes function not only as metaphors but also as stereotypes and quasi-symbols of culture. National culture is reflected in a given language and it is revealed in socio-political life, art, literature, philosophy, science and technological development. The research proved that there are both differences and similarities between the English and Georgian somatic idioms. The analyzed multiword units have one common feature: the functions of the somatic constituents of idioms are very important, since in the majority of cases, they constitute the semantic cores of given idioms which reveal the meaning of the whole unit.