1. Ad Foolen, Radboud University Nijmegen
The hand (and its parts) as a source (and target) in figurative thought and language
Ad Foolen, Radboud University Nijmegen

2. Why hand?
Embodiment  enactive embodiment  hand plays a central role in enaction
cf. John Stewart et al. (2010) Enaction. Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science.

3. Linguistic studies Kinga Erzse (2006) German and Rumanian
Sonila Sadikaj (2006) German and Albanian
Ahn & Kwon (2007) English
Márquez Linares & Moreno Ortiz (2009) Spanish
Vainik (2009) Estonian
Staffeldt (2011) German
Anastasios Vogiatzis (2012) Greek and English

4. Studies in other fields
Charles Bell (1833) The hand.
Frank Hamilton Cushing (1892) Manual concepts (Fieldwork Zuni Indians)
Géza Révész (1958 [1942]) The human hand: a psychological study.
Frank Wilson (1998) The hand. How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture.
Zdravko Radman (ed.) (2013) The hand, an organ of the mind.

5. Chirognomy

6. Evolution of hominids Bipedalism Opposite thumb  fine grip
Brain evolved as hand-monitor, cf. Gallagher (2013: 220): “the brain – it doesn’t work by itself, but in a larger system that includes the hands. This makes rationality in some respects enactive or action-oriented.”

7. Cortical humunculus

8. Ago ergo sum

9. Outline 2: Hand (and its parts) as target domain
3: Hand and fingers as source domain
4: A specific target domain: numerals
5: Handedness as part of laterality
6: The gestural origin of language
7: Conclusion

10. 2. Hand and fingers as target
Hand itself: ‘the grasper’
Hand and χέρι
Enfield et al. (2006) Cross-linguistic categorization of the body
Albanian: Plant  Hand (dry, not working)
Paws, claws  hand
Andaman: thumb ön-o-bo-tabe ‘head of the hand’

11. Target continued
Japanese: family  fingers. oya ubi = older finger, ko-ubi = child finger. Other fingers: uncle, brother, sister.
Dutch muis (cf. muscle)
Hand Palm  tree (leave)
Finger nail  metal nail

12. 3. Hand as source domain Compounds and derivations:
Verbs: Dutch handelen ‘to act, to do business’, behandelen ‘treat’, afhandelen ‘finish business’, onderhandelen ‘to negotiate’.
Adjectives: handig ‘handy’, onhandelbaar ‘hard to handle’
Nouns: washandje ‘wash-cloth’, English handyman, handkerchief

13. Phraseologisms in Duden 11: Form
Hand – Hände – Händchen
Hij heeft er een handje van om X te doen ‘He has a little hand to do X’, i.e. he tends to do X in a quick and secret way.
German Händchen halten ‘to hold little hands’

14. Duden 11: Form continued
Quantification: keine, zwei, beide, viele, alle
Mit beiden Händen zugreifen,
Dutch: twee handen op één buik ‘two hands on one belly’
Adjectives: voll, leer, sauber, schmutzig, gut, sicher, erste, letzte, frei, lose, fest, locker, offen, hohl, helfend, schützend, klebrig, hart, sanft, linke rechte, grün, treu, gut, sicher.

15. Form continued
Verbs: kriegen, geben, übergehen, greifen; sein, liegen, haben; fallen
Syntactic function of hand:
- Not often as subject. Eine Hand wäscht die andere ‚manus manum lavat (Seneca, Petronius)
- More often as object: Die Hände in den Schoß legen ‚to lay the hands in the lap’, doing nothing
- Most often as prepositional object: Das liegt auf der Hand ‘that is obvious’.

16. Form continued
Prepositions (hand as PP): in, an, aus, zu durch, bei, auf, unter, von
Other body parts: Haar, Auge, Mund, Herz, Bauch, Knie, Fuß
Sich vor Lachen auf die Knie schlagen ‚to slap on your knees because of laughing’. Dutch: Je op je knieën slaan van het lachen.
Von der Hand in den Mund leben: to be poor, easily spend money. Dutch: Van de hand in de tand leven.

17. Semantics of idioms
Goossens (1990), Geeraerts (2002), Barnden (2010), Radden, Panther, Barcelona, Brdar, etc.
Dutch: Hij kreeg de handen er niet voor op elkaar ‘He didn’t get the hands on eacht other for it [the proposal]’

18. Vogiatzis (2012): 9 target domains
1. help/affection
2. control/lack of control/freedom
3. skill/action/lack of ability
4. money
5. proximity
6. assault
7. responsibility / lack of responsibility
8. success / failure
9. certainty

19. Poster of right wing party VVD

20. Hand in Greek certainty
Βάζω το χέρι μου στη φωτιά [put my hand in fire]: Be sure for what someone says
Κόβω/δίνω το δεξί μου χέρι [cut/give my right hand]: Be sure for what someone says
Ψηφίσω κάποιον και με τα δυο χέρια [Vote for sb with both hands] : Vote for sb without any doubt
Πηγαίνω με το σταυρό στο χέρι [move/go with the cross in hand] : In an honest way, believing that all others follow the rules as well
Βάζω το χέρι μου στο ευαγγέλιο [put my hand on the Gospel] : Be sure for what sb says
Να μου κοπεί το χέρι αν [my hand to be cut if]: Used to show that sb tells the truth

21. Other languages Dutch certainty:
De hand voor iemand in het vuur durven steken, ‘to put the hand in the fire for someone’
M’n hand eraf ‘my hand off’
German Aus erster hand, Rumanian: din prima surša (Erzse)
Albanian: protection not as target domain (Sadikaj)

22. Target Domain 6: Assault (and other negative domains)
- Assault, aggression, fighting: handgemeen, op de vuist gaan, losse handen hebben,
- If someone is handtastelijk, ‘touching by hand’, he easily touches other people, in particular from the other sex.
- suicide is called de hand aan zichzelf slaan ‘to put the hand on yourself’.
- stealing: In Sesoeto you can say o letsoho ‘he is a hand’, meaning ‘he is a thief’
- Trade and agreements: handjeklap with the diminutive from ‘hand’, combined with the stem of the verb klappen, to ‘clap’. This means that people make a deal to their advantage, secretly, excluding others.

23. Other target domains?
Time, see French maintenant ‘now’, lit. ‘hand holding’, see for different explanations Van Ginneken (1939) and etymological dictionaries
Character traits and feelings:
Zwaar op de hand zijn ‘to be heavy on the hand’, i.e. not easy-going
Met de handen in het haar zitten ‘to sit with the hands in the hair’, i.e. to be desperate

24. 4. Numerals
Heine (1997: 21): “The human hand provides the most important model for structuring the numeral system.”
5 or 10 as base

25. Numerals continued
Stanislaus Dehaene (1997) The number sense: ‘Subitizing’
Dan Everett (2012) about Pirahã
1: finger
2: finger, finger
3: middle
4: small hand
5: Austronesian lima
6: jump
7: hand and two
8: two peaks
9: two hands minus one
10: decem ‘two hands’
20: one man

26. Depicting numerals
Cushing (1892: 297): “It seems more than probable that the figures and letters in this system [Roman numerals], representing all numbers up to ten, at least, were selected or devised by their earliest inventors, in either deliberate or spontaneous imitation of the fingers, of, first, the left hand, then of the right, as used and seen in counting.”
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X
1, 2, 3

27. Numerals and writing
Röhr (1994): 82): “the ability to account for the storage of numerical information has always played an integral part in the evolution of different systems of writing.”

28. 5. Handedness
Handedness and laterality: general questions (cf. McManus 2002)
Asymmetry, Corballis (1991) The lopsided ape
Typically human? (Answer: probably yes)
Holistic (hand – foot – brain)? (Answer: probably no)
Cause of right handedness in humans
Cushing: heart  protecting & fighting;
Wilson: holding child left  right hand is free for action) (Evaluation: unproven stories)

29. 5. Laterality ‘Neutral’ hand expressions:
On one hand … on the other hand
Dutch Aan de ene kant … aan de andere kant
German einerseits … andererseits
Casasanto: individual level, handedness and subjective preferences go together
Cultural level: right side is the preferred one, see:
Latin: Ad dexteram Patris; sinister
To be someone’s right hand, He has two left hands.
German: Das mache ich doch mit links!
German Ehe zur linken Hand, ‘marriage with the left hand’.
But Spanish: positive connotation of mano izquierda ‘left hand’, meaning ‘gentle hand’

30. Laterality continued: different names for left and right hand
- In Anglosaxon, the right hand is called swidra, which means the strong one.
- Bakongo:
right hand is kooko kwalubakala = the hand of men
left hand is kooko kwalukento = the hand of women
- Basoeto:
right hand is letsoho la hoja = the hand for eating
left hand is letsoho la botsoara-thebe = the hand for taking the shield

31. Paraskevi Argyriou & Sotaro Kita (2013)
Left-hand gesture has a stimulating effect on metaphor processing (strengthened awareness of relation between source and target)
Explaining metaphors to L2 learners, for example: To spill the beans
Group 1: no gestures
Group 2: right hand gestures
Group 3: left hand gestures (more explanations involving the source domain)

32. 6. Gestural origin of language
Van Ginneken (1939), Corballis (1991, 2002), Armstrong et al. (1995)
Gestures still play an important role in communication
Some figurative expressions relate to (emblematic) gestures, like high-five, fingers crossed, thumps up.
More studies on the relation between figurative language and gesture are necessary.

33. 7. Conclusion
- Hand is a productive source (and target) domain for figurative expressions.
This fits the view that enactive embodiment is the basis for cognition and language.
Further cross-linguistic research is needed to understand the balance between universals and cultural variation in the role of the hand in conceptualization.

34. References
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Argyriou, Paraskevi & Sotaro Kita (2013) The effect of left-hand gesture on metaphor explanation.
Armstrong, David F., William C. Stokoe Sherman E. Wilcox Gesture and the nature of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barnden, John A Metaphor and metonymy: Making their connections more slippery. Cognitive Linguistics 21(1), 1-34.
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Geeraerts, Dirk The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in composite expressions. In: R. Dirven & R. Pörings (eds.), Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,

35. References continued
Ginneken, Jacques van La reconstruction typologique des langues archaïques de l’humanité. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uittevers-Maatschappij.
Goossens, Louis Metaphtonymy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. Cognitive Linguistics 1,
Gvozdanović, Jadranka. Ed Numeral types and changes worldwide. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Heine, Bernd Cognitive foundations of grammar. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luján Martínez, Eugenio Ramón The Indo-European system of numerals from ‘1’ to ’10’. In: J. Gvozdanović (ed.),
Majewicz, Alfred F Le role du doigt et de la main et leurs designations en certaines langues dans la formation des systems particuliers de numeration et des noms de nombre. Lingua Posnaniensis 26, Also in Fanny de Sievers (ed.) (1981),
Marchand, Trevor, H.J Knowledge in hand: Explorations of brain, hand and tool. In: Richard Fardon et al. (eds.), The Sage handbook of social anthropology. Vol. 2,
Márquez Linares, Carlos, and Antonio Moreno Ortiz Fraseología comparada mediante el uso de córpora textuales: el caso de mano/hand. In Estudios de lingüística descriptiva y comparada. Sevilla: Kronos,
McManus, Chris Right Hand, Left Hand: the origins of asymmetry in brains, bodies, atoms and cultures. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Radman, Zdravko ed The hand, an organ of the mind. What the manual tells the mental.
Révész, Géza The human hand: a psychological study. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Röhr, Heinz Markus Writing. Its evolution and relation to speech. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Sadikaj, Sonila Metaphorische Konzepte in somatischen Phraseologismen des Deutschen und Albanischen. Eine kontrastive Untersuchung anhand von Herz- und Hand-Somatismen. Phd. Würzburg,
de Sievers, Fanny. Ed La main et les doigts dans l’expression linguistique. Paris:SELAF.
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Vainik, Ene Towards a conceptualized model of bodily communication: A study of hand-expressions in Estonian. In: J. Zlatev, M. Andrén, C. Lundmark, and M. Falck Johnsson (eds.) Studies in Language and Cognition. London: Cambridge Scholars Press,

36. Thank you!