SALIENCE, LINGUISTIC CATEGORIZATION AND GRAMMATICALIZATION

SALIENCE, LINGUISTIC CATEGORIZATION AND GRAMMATICALIZATION

Author:  R.S. Kimov

Affiliation:  Kabardino-Balkar State University named after H.M. Berbekov

Abstract: 
The article is a brief analysis of how ontologically salient properties of a nose (as a part of human or animal's face) are conceptualized by the native speakers of Kabardian, Russian and English. The author discusses the contribution of the mentionedobject's properties to the metaphorical extension of the lexeme denoting nose in Kabardian, in which zoomorphic conceptualization model is predominant. It has been hypothesized that it is owing to the salient properties that the Kabardian lexeme develops into a prefixed grammatical form to bound root-morphemes to encode some spatial concepts.

Keywords:  categorization, zoomorphic / anthropomorphic model of conceptualization, salience, metaphorical extension, grammaticalization