The Conceptualization of HEAD among the Hausa Based on Verbal and Nonverbal Representations

HEAD is cross-linguistically associated with a set of meanings linked to the notions of ‘top’, ‘wisdom/intellect’, ‘important person/importance’, ‘beginning’ (Kraska-Szlenk 2014: 78, Hilpert 2007: 85). The phenomenon responsible for this similarity is metonymy, which is“a natural state of affairs in using body part terms in their different micro-senses” (Kraska-Szlenk 2014: 20). The embodiment hypothesis, stating that human beings understand complex aspects of their everyday experience through their bodies (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), is helpful in explaining why the users of different languages tend to form similar metaphors which give rise to similar meanings associated with a particular body part. However, it is not clear why, in cases in which more than one lexeme for HEAD exists in a language, there is usually a fixed mapping between a given lexeme and a meaning, e.g. Haupt in German denotes ‘leader, main, important’ and Kopf is ‘locus of thought’ (Siahaan 2011: 95–101). It is also not clear why a given language usually picks up some of the meanings associated cross-linguistically with a given body part, while the other meanings are either not present or marginal. For example, HEAD is rarely used as ‘locus of thought’ in Indonesian, while it is extremely often used to convey the meaning ‘leader’ (Siahaan 2011:104).In ancient Hebrew, theHEART rather than theHEAD is associated with the locus of thought, decision, intention and will (Good 1990: 16). In Norwegian, HEAD is never used to connote the metaphor TOP OF AN ORGANIZATION, which is common in English, such as in ‘head of the household’ (Mol 2004: 99). Cognitive analysis of HEAD in various languages has also shown that it is either its function (i.e. thinking/reasoning abilities) or its position (i.e. a body part located above all others) which is the most salient in producing new meanings (Siahaan 2011: 112). The paper discusses the conceptualization of HEAD in Hausa. A crucial part is dedicated to examining the extension of the meaning of the word kai. The various sub-senses of the term are divided into two main categories: HEAD as location and HEAD as person (section 3 and 4). In the following part (section 5), the focus shifts from the ‘static head’ to the dynamic one and a discussion of the extensions of phrases describing the movement of the head is conducted. The last part of the paper (section 6) turns to visual modality to explore whether gestures referring to the head (pointing to the head with a finger or lifting the hands towards the head) add something to the notion of HEAD.