Abstract

The study revisits the figurativity of an external body part term, the "mouth" in English. A synchronic Cognitive Linguistics approach to analysing mouth as a source domain is adopted, aiming to uncover what target concepts the mouth is deployed to figuratively conceptualise. In discussing the target concepts, the focus falls on the role of image schemas and metonymies in building up figurative conceptual complexes (Ruiz de Mendoza and Masegosa 2014), contrasting it with the one of metaphors in [Adj N] constructions with the same body part. A hypothesis is put forward that when used in fully lexically specified constructions in English the mouth is predominantly metonymically projected, while metaphoricity is more pronounced in other types of figurative expressions, where the mouth has a naming function and is not part of an explicitly described scene.