Sarcouncil Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies

Abstract: Among the lexical fields of Korean, the facial body-part terms 눈 (nun, ‘eye’), 코 (ko, ‘nose’) and 입 (ip, ‘mouth’) display one of the strongest and most varied capacities for semantic extension. Drawing on the framework of Cognitive Semantics — specifically the theory of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy of Lakoff & Johnson (1980), the radial category model of Lakoff (1987), the Cognitive Grammar of Langacker (1987, 1991), and Kövecses’s (2002, 2010) account of the cultural variation of metaphor — in combination with Lexical Semantics, this article offers a systematic analysis of the semantic-extension models of 눈, 코 and 입 and contrasts them with their Vietnamese counterparts. The analysis rests on a dataset of 68 derived senses and fixed expressions (23 for 눈, 21 for 코, 24 for 입) extracted from the Standard Korean Language Dictionary and the Vietnamese Dictionary, cross-checked against published Korean–Vietnamese contrastive studies. The findings show that conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy, operating on the universal basis of embodiment, are the principal mechanisms governing extension from concrete to abstract meaning. The way in which particular conceptual mappings are selected and conventionalised, however — for instance, why “the height of the nose” is conventionalised as a scale of pride in Korean but not in Vietnamese — may be related to the way each speech community organises its spatial-orientational models and the social-evaluative values attached to the face, rather than deriving necessarily from a single aesthetic standard. On this basis, the article proposes a principle of vocabulary teaching oriented towards “decoding the cognitive schema”, illustrated by a concrete classroom activity.