Most of the chapters of the present volume developed from papers presented at the international conference "The Body in Language" held in Warsaw on the 21-22 October 2011.

Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material -- The Body in Language: An Introduction / Matthias Brenzinger and Iwona Kraska-Szlenk -- The Body in Language: Observations from Grammaticalization / Bernd Heine -- Grammaticalization of Body-Part Terms in Ethiosemitic / Abinet Sime Gebreyes -- Extending Body-Part Terms in the Domain of Emotions / Iwona Kraska-Szlenk -- Corporeal Incorporation and Extension in Dene Sųłiné (Athapaskan) Lexicalization / Sally Rice -- The Cow’s Body as the Source Domain of Philosophical Metaphors in the Ṛgveda: The Case of ‘Udder’ (ūdhar) / Joanna Jurewicz -- Our Collocating Body Parts: Recurring Images of Self and Other in the Use of English Body-Part Terms / John Newman -- Notions of self in Hausa / Nina Pawlak -- Hausa Metaphors: Gestural Idioms Containing Body-Part Terms / Izabela Will -- The up/down Orientation in Language and Music / Elżbieta Górska -- Embodiment in Zande / Helma Pasch -- Body Parts We Live By in Language and Culture: The raaS ‘Head’ and yidd ‘Hand’ in Tunisian Arabic / Zouheir Maalej -- What Hands/Arms Can Say: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Swahili Body-Part Terms Mkono and Mikono / Serena Talento -- Grammaticalization of Body Part Terms in Mundabli / Rebecca Voll -- Whomever It Concerns—Notions of Control, Initiation and Affectedness in Expressions of Body-Centred Activities in Mbembe / Doris Richter genannt Kemmermann -- Sexual, Impure, Vulgar: An Analysis of the Intimate Body-Part Terms in Egyptian Arabic / Magdalena Zawrotna -- Selected Body-Part Terms as a Means for Conveying Abstract Concepts in The Economist: The Case of Head, Eye, Mouth and Nose / Tatiana Szczygłowska -- Semiotic Conceptualization of the Human Body and the Case Study of Russian ‘Navel’ / Grigory Kreydlin , Svetlana Pereverzeva and Lidia Khesed -- Author Index -- Language Index -- Subject Index.

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The Body in Language: Comparative studies of Linguistic Embodiment provides new insights into the theory of linguistic embodiment in its universal and cultural aspects. The contributions of the volume offer theoretical reflections on grammaticalization, lexical semantics, philosophy, multimodal communication and - by discussing metaphorization and metonymy in figurative language - on cognitive linguistics in general. Case studies contribute first-hand data on embodiment from more than 15 languages and present findings on the body in language in diverse cultures from various continents. Embodiment fundamentally underlies human conceptualization and the present discussions reveal a wide range of target domains in conceptual transfers with the body as the source domain.