Phraseological Productivity and Conceptual Profiles of Somatic Components in Modern Standard Arabic: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Somatic phraseological units – multiword expressions whose pivotal or dependent component denotes a part of the human body – constitute one of the oldest and most productive layers of the phraseological stock of any language. This article examines the phraseological productivity and the conceptual profiles of somatic components in Modern Standard Arabic on the basis of a purpose-built corpus of 844 somatic phraseological units extracted from a dictionary of idiomatic expression in contemporary Arabic (Dāwūd, 2003), covering 71 distinct body-part lexemes. The study pursues two aims: to establish the productivity hierarchy of somatic components and the distribution of figurative mechanisms across the corpus, and to map the conceptual fields generated by the six most productive components – yad ‘hand’, ʿayn ‘eye’, qalb ‘heart’, wajh ‘face’, raʾs ‘head’ and lisān ‘tongue’. The quantitative analysis shows that external body parts account for roughly three-quarters of all units, that metonymy outranks metaphor among overtly figurative units, and that the productivity ranking of Arabic somatisms broadly parallels that reported for genetically unrelated languages. The qualitative analysis reveals that each productive component anchors a structured set of conceptual domains – power, perception, emotion, social standing, cognition and speech – confirming that the body functions as a coherent and culturally elaborated source domain in Arabic phraseology. The findings carry implications for bilingual lexicography, translation and the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language.