Cultures Think Alike and Unlike: A Cognitive Study of Arabic and English Body Parts Idioms

This paper analyses a corpus of body part idioms in Arabic and English. Based on the cognitive view and due to human beings' common awareness of their bodies' functions, this study argues that the meaning of an idiom can sometimes be inferred from its constituent words.The researchers begin by referring to the cognitive basis of idiomatic expressions, and dealing with the topics of the universality of conceptualization of metaphors. At a later stage, the study deals with the data analysis of the Arabic body part idioms and their English equivalents. The outcomes of the study establish similarities between the cognitive systems in both languages, dealing with body-part idioms analysis. The results also show that the dissimilarity of conceptual figurative images in both languages results from some culture-specific idiosyncrasies