Embodiment in the right-left conceptual mapping? A comparative and diachronic perspective

Although it is widely assumed that hands are the embodied source for RIGHT and LEFT conceptual polarity (Bickel 1994; Heine 1997), the specific nature of this metaphorical mapping from the concrete source domain to the abstract target domain is still an open question. This issue is complicated by the fact that the spatial schema is also activated to represent emotional concepts (Casasanto 2009), giving rise to the linguistic metaphors GOOD IS RIGHT and BAD IS LEFT. In a crosslinguistic perspective, RIGHT and LEFT terms are recruited to designate cardinal directions (Brown 1983), respectively east and west in ancient Indo-European languages such as Vedic Sanskrit, Hittite, Homeric Greek, and Umbrian. The origin of these spatial uses is traditionally ascribed to the orientation of the observer’s body (Grimm 1848), and the etymological strong asymmetry between RIGHT and LEFT terms has been ascribed to cultural conventions reflecting the embodied asymmetry within the hand domain (Van Leeuwen-Turnovcová 1990; Giannakis 2019). However, the words for RIGHT and LEFT derive from lexical roots that are not primarily related to the sides of the body (Foolen 2019), thus challenging the embodied origin of these metaphors. Moreover, the ‘absolute’ use of RIGHT and LEFT within a geocentric orientation system, as evidenced by the analysis of ancient texts, suggests that the extension to hands derives from a mental metaphor that goes from cosmogony to the body (Kuiper 1970), proving that the conceptual mapping between body parts and other domains is not unidirectional (Sinha & Jensen de López 2000).