Semiotic conceptualization of the body and the comparative phraseology

Abstract

The article considers a fragment of the Russian and Spanish semiotic conceptualization of the human body. This fragment is presented by the somatic object “heart”, as there are phraseological somatisms with the name of this object both in Russian and in Spanish. The article provides a semantic description of the Russian word сердце and its Spanish equivalent corazón: ‘an invisible somatic object located in the upper left part of the human body behind the chest. The heart can be heard because it is constantly beating. The main function of the heart is to supply blood to all somatic objects in the human body’. The importance of including physical, structural and functional features of the heart into the semantic representations of these words is demonstrated. Among the physical features of the heart we consider caritivity and redundancy, among the structural ones – the presence of alien objects on / inside the heart (in particular, hair or wool), as the functional ones – the ability of the heart to supply blood to the body and its parts. This feature approach allows to explain some of the uses of the Spanish and Russian words for the heart. The difference in phraseological somatisms of two languages with these words is demonstrated.