THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF AZỤ ‘BACK’ IN IGBO

Abstract

The lexical item azụ ‘back’ in Igbo, a West Benue-Congo branch of Niger Congo language family in West Africa, has the concrete meaning ‘back’ in Igbo which has been confirmed to occur with several lexical items. This paper examines the various groupings of azụ such as azụ as part of human body, azụ in terms of location in time, and azụ in terms of space. There is a conceptual metaphor involving a mapping between this concrete meaning and these other domains. Speakers of the language use the HUMAN BODY as their source domain to conceptualize the target domains following their anthropocentric experiences of the world. The data for the study was elicited from everyday conversations, and from a concordance of the keyword drawn from self-created corpora consisting of fictional, popular periodicals and religious Igbo texts. Using the LancsBox corpus tool to extract the keyword azụ, the Conceptual Metaphor Approach was adopted in the data analysis. The findings of the study show that azụ, apart from its concrete and idiomatic meanings ‘back’, can also be conceptualized metaphorically in Igbo. The metaphorical extensions of azụ are found within the domain of space and time in which the domain of space is more prominent. For instance, the source domain azụ can be mapped unto the target domains of ‘behaviour’, ‘academics’, ‘competition’, ‘distance’ such as the domain mapping of SPACE and TIME in terms of our knowledge of the position of azụ ‘back’ in the human body, in order to express progression or retrogression, winning or losing a contest or to denote time. The conclusion is that the use of corpora reveals the various nuances of meanings and conceptualization of azụ, which is very useful for language teaching and learning, especially with regard to expression that can only be disambiguated in context.