BODILY-GROUNDED KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE IN CONTRASTIVE IDIOM ANALYSIS. A CASE STUDY

Starting from the general idea that understanding metaphors and idioms can provide insights into cultures and contribute to improved cross-cultural communication, the present paper investigates SWEET idioms in English and Romanian. It identifies which of the possible combinations of metaphorical concepts and metaphorical expressions can be found in the two languages. The patterns that are usually discussed in the literature on metaphor translation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics (Kövecses, 2005; Al-Hasnawi, 2007) are the following: (1) metaphors with similar mapping conditions and similar lexicalization: e.g. R. a finumai zahăr și miere (lit. be all sugar and honey), E. be all sweetness. (2) metaphors with similar mapping conditions but different lexicalization: R. a face ochi dulci cuiva (lit.make sweet eyes to someone), E. make sheep eyes to someone. (3) metaphors with different mapping conditions and different lexicalization: R. a fi un om de zahăr (lit. be a sugar man) E. be very kind. Taking a bottom-up approach we have looked at 40 Sweet idioms in English and Romanian and observed that, in both languages, instantiations of the basic metaphorical concept SWEETNESS IS GOOD are higher in number than SWEETNESS IS BAD. The analysis will bring evidence for the idea that two languages can have the same metaphor but select different source domain/frame elements to express different aspects of the target domain pattern.