Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Factors of Somatic Idioms in English

Abstract

As an essential part of the general vocabulary, idioms reflect the environment, life, history, and culture of the native speakers, and are closely associated with their innermost spirits and feelings. The question emerges that these idioms could have had both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that could have influenced their appearance. In this article we aim at examining both linguistic and extra-linguistic features and ways of somatic idioms emergence in the English language. To be explicit we will compare English somatic idioms having different human part body key words to various body parts with somatic expressions of the same nature in the Romanian language.

Keywords

• vocabulary
• idiom
• human body parts
• linguistic and extra-linguistic factors
• semantic evolution and somatic idiom