A comparative study of metonymies and metaphors with hand in English, German and Spanish, within the framework of cognitive linguistics

The folk model of hand presented in this dissertation is an introspective analysis that aims at describing the mental structures, shaped by experience, of speakers of three languages, taking expressions with hand and analysing their usage in English, German and Spanish. The aim of this study is to provide a picture of how the human mind is conceptually organised in the three different linguistic communities. The main focus here will be the metonymies and metaphors found in the corpora, and the different ways in which they shape the cultural models existing in the three languages. Before attempting the practical corpus analyses, some theoretical tenets will be reviewed. Firstly, the work is concerned with providing a definition of metonymy and, by extension, of metaphor, as contemplated by traditional language theories. With this in mind, the evolution of the concept is traced since it first appeared in Greek manuals of rhetoric, aiming at capturing its development from a mere tool for the embellishment of oratory texts to a linguistic phenomenon that constitutes an important conceptual mechanism for the production of language. This diachronic account is followed by an outline of some of the basic principles of the relatively recent theory of metaphor first brought to notice by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980. Here, a re-definition of metaphor will be necessary, inevitably focusing on this trope (and momentarily neglecting metonymy) in view of its prominent position in cognitive linguistics theory. In a subsequent stage, the work brings together the cognitive linguistic theories of embodied realism and figurative thinking to provide a description of metaphor and metonymy that will dive deeper into the background of cognitive semantics.