An Analysis of Heart and Head Metaphors in English and Arabic

Objectives: This paper examines how heart and head metaphors are conceptualized and used in American English and Jordanian Arabic (JA) with a view to highlighting the similarities as well as the differences between the two. The study also examines how the formation of such expressions is influenced by human body experiences.
Methods: This paper uses a qualitative approach based on Lakoff and Johnson (1980) for analyzing a corpus of 140 heart and head metaphorical expressions from both languages, which was built by the researchers.
Results: The findings show that the conceptualization and the manifestation of the metaphorical expressions under investigation differ in terms of the linguistic expressions used and the conceptual metaphors from which they generate. Although English and Arabic are unrelated as they belong to different language families, the findings show that there is still a common ground for conceptualizing the bodily-based human experiences through metaphor.
Conclusions: Due to their importance in facilitating communication, the study recommends examining the metaphorical expressions of other body organs in English and Arabic other than heart and head.