A Cross-Cultural Study of the Biological Motivation of Hand and Foot Metonymy-based Metaphors in Persian and English

The present research provides a cross-cultural study about hand and foot metonomy-based metaphors in Persian and English by means of a semantic analysis. The research method is exploratory and its data includes 32 conventional metaphorical expressions containing hand and foot body terms which are taken from the idioms of The Free Dictionary, and their Persian equivalents are extracted based on Farhang Moaser One-Volume Millennium English-Persian Dictionary (Haghshenas et al., 2002). The research objective is to explain the biological motivation of the metaphors on the basis of holistic medicine. The research findings show that a number of the metaphorical expressions related to hands and feet can be investigated based on their biological origin in the holistic medicine, and the others are schematic and symbolic and formed according to externally visible events and bodily functions. The results indicate that, regarding the same biological origin, we can see relatively similar metonymies, while cultural patterns have created different metaphors in both Persian and English.