Metonymic and metaphorical extensions of English heart and their Swedish translation equivalents

Sonja Mardanbigi

Abstract

This study explores the usage of English heart in figurative expressions. English is rich in both metonymic and metaphorical expressions making use of the concept heart to speak of emotional issues. The aims of this study have been to investigate how English heart corresponds to Swedish hjärta in figurative uses in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. Thus, it has been of interest to see what the translation equivalents are for heart and what the distribution of non-literal equivalents of heart are. A debate has arisen in recent years concerning the interaction between metaphor and metonymy which has given rise to the term metaphtonymy (Goossens 1995). Therefore, it was of interest to examine to what extent metaphor and metonymy were involved in heart In order to accomplish these aims, the translations have been categorized according to Niemeier’s (2000) four categories and the metaphor HEART IS CENTER. These have been set up because each of them shows a different degree of connection between metaphors and metonymies. The results of this research suggest that in the majority of the examples heart was rendered by hjärta. In the examples where hjärta was not used, translators used a variety of lexemes, many of which were only used once. In addition it is shown that categories which have the strongest characteristics of metaphor and metonymy tended get more uniform translations.

Keywords: metaphor, metonymy, metaphtonymy, corpus, translation, cross-linguistic perspective, heart, hjärta, English, Swedish