Meaning Extension of the Body-part Term, ‘Eye’, between Chinese and Korean

Abstract

Body-part terms do not just mean our body parts but are used in a range of areas in our daily life. From the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy play a representative role in the process of extending meaning of body-part terms, which is calculated from the relationship between similarity and adjacency. The study investigated what concepts `eye`, one of the most important body parts, hold in Chinese and Korean each and how it is used to be expressed in language; also, metaphorical transfer of the conceptual domain by Heine et al was used to study how the meaning is extended. As a result of the comparison, the meaning of the Chinese body-part term `眼/目` has been extended in the order of man ＞ animal ＞ plant ＞ object ＞ action ＞ space ＞ time ＞ quantity ＞ abstraction area, while the Korean `눈` has been extended in the order of man ＞ animal ＞ plant ＞ object ＞ action ＞ space ＞ time ＞ abstraction area. This resulted from linking the characteristics of familiar body parts to different concepts; it was revealed that language is deeply related to recognition and physical experience of human being. As for meaning extension, functional characteristics take the biggest proportion, followed by morphological characteristics, structural characteristics and positional characteristics. Speakers with different language and cultural backgrounds see the same object in a different point of view, and this may result in unique and its own meaning extension for Chinese and Korean each by highlighting different aspects. For example, differences are shown in plant, object, time and quantity domains. As for morphological characteristics of the word: first, as some Chinese words have different meanings in a single form, `眼` shows grammatical metonymy that it is used as a unit noun; meanwhile, Korean has no such phenomenon. Second, the meaning extension in Chinese is mainly complex forms, but that in Korean is usually a single form; this reveals that Chinese has comprehensive meanings, while Korean is very flexible and highly depends on the context.