Body Part Terms in Fulfulde: A Cognitive Linguistics Approach

This thesis discusses the semantic extensions of Fulfulde body part terms from a cognitive linguistics perspective. Fulfulde is a West Atlantic language spoken in many African countries, but more densely in the Western sub-region of the content, by about 30 million people. The theoretical basis of the work stems from the embodiment hypothesis which assumes that the human body provides a universal template for the conceptualization, and therefore, expression of abstract concepts, through various cognitive processes, such as metaphors and metonymies (cf. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The data of the research was extracted from various written and oral sources, as well as the social media, providing a suitably sufficient linguistic expressions involving human body part terms extended into myriad of conceptual domains. The results of this study provide significant insight into the cognitive aspects of Fulfulde, a hitherto neglected topic in the description of language, and provides further case study of the embodiment hypothesis, as well as the conceptual metaphor theory, in general.