THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF AZU? ‘BACK’ IN IGBO

Abstract

The lexical item az? ‘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 az? such as az? as part of human body, az? in terms of location in time, and az? 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 az?, the Conceptual Metaphor Approach was adopted in the data analysis. The findings of the study show that az?, apart from its concrete and idiomatic meanings ‘back’, can also be conceptualized metaphorically in Igbo. The metaphorical extensions of az? are found within the domain of space and time in which the domain of space is more prominent. For instance, the source domain az? 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 az? ‘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 az?, which is very useful for language teaching and learning, especially with regard to expression that can only be disambiguated in context.