Abstract
This study attempts to give a cognitive semantic study of eye expressions (EEs) in Chinese, Spanish and German. The majority of the data are collected from corpora and dictionaries. The research questions are: (1) Is the BODY IS STATIC hypothesis proposed by Hsieh and Lu (2012) valid? (2) Do the verbs in EEs showing emotions suggest something? And, (3) what cultural aspects do the EEs in three languages involve? The results show that the analysis of semantic molecules and tenors of the EEs confirm the validity of BODY IS STATIC hypothesis. The verbs of the EEs play an important role in expressing emotion. The verbs that are inherited for other body parts, such as for hand, mouth, are extended to the sight domain and assist such emotion communication effectively. Bodily experiences work in linguistic as a whole as well. Finally, cultural aspects of social behavior and social communication in the specific social groups are shown. They are all revealed through a cross-cultural linguistic comparison.
Highlights
This study attempts to give a cognitive semantic study of eye expressions (EEs) in Chinese, Spanish and German
This study examines the body-part vehicle eyes in Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and German in order to provide a cross-linguistic comparison for the purpose of exploring: (1) The validity of BODY IS STATIC hypothesis, and (2) emotions that EEs express and the role their verbs play, and (3) what do the EEs imply the respective cultural aspects?
This paper will be presented in the following way: (1) introduction, (2) research framework, (3) we analyze the data and present the semantic molecules and the meaning of the eye expressions in order to test BODY IS STATIC
Summary
We examine the semantic molecules of eye in EEs and tenors of the eye expressions in Chinese, Spanish and German for the attempt to answer the research questions one, whether BODY IS STATIC is valid. The semantic molecules Semantic molecules reveal how a linguistic vehicle is used in a language semantically; how the vehicle expresses meaning. We list the significant semantic molecules of EEs in Chinese, Spanish and German in Table 2 below. We list the significant semantic molecules of EEs in Chinese, Spanish and German in Table 2 below. 2
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