Human Body in the Czech Paremiology: An Ethnolinguistic Study

The submitted Master's thesis deals with the linguistic picture of the human body and its parts in proverbs, which are listed in Václav Flajšhans's dictionary Česká přísloví (Czech proverbs). The material is processed using approaches and methodological tools of cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics. First of all the theoretical and methodological framework of the thesis is outlined, these are in particular approaches of cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics to language and the theory of linguistic picture of the world. These methods are then used to analyse the linguistic picture of human body and its parts in Czech, as arises from proverbs. Then the research paremiological context is defined and possible approaches to proverbs are characterized. The proverb is then defined using specialized literature. Individual chapters that focus on parts of human body present meanings of somatic idioms that are explained with help of monolingual dictionaries. Also there are lists of the most common collocations and idioms in which these somatic idioms occur. The linguistic picture of the human body and its parts in the Czech language picture of the world is then worked out on the basis of the analysed proverbs. These proverbs are used to present linguistic pictures of the sense of sight and hearing..