Variation in embodied metaphors: a contrastive analysis of taste metaphors in Spanish and English

Whereas in the late 90s universal character of many embodied conceptual metaphors was overemphasised, last years some authors have claimed that culture plays a crucial role motivation all kinds metaphors, including those grounded on bodily experiences. In order to shed light this issue, we carry out contrastive analysis with basic tastes as source domain Spanish and English. To end, employ mixed approach, combining data from dictionaries linguistic corpora. Our reveals variation is higher at level expression lower, but still significant, level. Although most taste are shared by English, few language-specific also found, proving food has an influence metaphors.