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Australian languages have emotional expressions using a range of words that refer to the abdomen in a somewhat vague way. This includes words for ‘stomach area’, ‘trunk’, ‘guts’, or ‘abdominal organs (all of them)’ for instance. There seem to be concentrations of expressions featuring such generic terms for the abdomen in Cape York, the Pilbara and Arnhem Land.

Broadening from belly and heart

In some languages, such words for abdomen can also designate one major organ. In Wik Mungkan (Cape York) for example, the word ngangk is reported to translate both as ‘stomach area’ and as ‘heart’. We know that body-part words often change meaning from a smaller body part to a larger area of the body. Therefore, it is likely that ngangk used to mean just ‘heart’ but its meaning is gradually broadening, and it is going through a phase where it covers both ‘heart’ and ‘stomach area’. More generally, it is likely that historically, many of the generic terms for abdominal areas used to refer to specific organs such as the heart, the belly, the liver etc., and their meaning has now extended. 

This helps explain why emotional expressions with such generic abdominal words present strong resemblances with expressions that feature the belly or the heart, both in terms of the emotions they express and the metaphors they recruit. Expressions with the abdomen convey anger, as well as other emotions oriented towards others like hatred, sulking, compassion and grief. All these are also dominant with belly expressions. In addition, the abdomen expresses fear and related emotions as well as desire, love, and other emotions related to affection. These are dominant with the heart.

Intensification

The metaphors invoked in expressions with the abdomen mirror those found with the belly and heart. They include resistance, destruction, ‘otherness’, accessibility, movement and position, in comparable proportions (see the pages for belly and heart). Many expressions simply combine the abdomen with an emotion term, as in Wik Mungkan (Cape York) ngangk kuupaman ‘stomach area feel glad’, where the entire expression also means ‘feel glad’. This pattern is shared with the belly and heart, though the abdomen exhibits an important difference: in many cases, the resulting expression describes a more intense emotion. For instance, in Arrernte (Central Australia) atne atere ‘guts afraid’ means ‘shitscared (very scared)’.

Physiological responses

Some expressions with the abdomen evoke a plausible physical response to an emotion. For instance, we found an expression meaning ‘abdomen ticklish’ employed to describe nervousness; presumably inspired by the sensitivity of the abdomen to tickling. However, given the etymologies of abdomen words, as well as the meaning and patterns of metaphors of emotional expressions involving the abdomen, it is likely that rather than being inspired by physical characteristics of the abdomen, many expressions with the abdomen derive from belly and heart expressions. As with liver expressions, languages may have had expressions with heart or belly, and the words for these body parts have acquired a broader meaning, producing emotional expressions with the abdomen (see the liver page for a discussion of this mechanism).

References

Henderson, John and Veronica Dobson. Eastern and Central Arrernte to English dictionary. Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1994.

Kilham, Christine, Mabel Pamulkan, Jennifer Pootchemunka, and Topsy Wolmby. Wik Mungkan-English interactive dictionary. AuSIL Interactive Dictionary Series A-6, Australian Society for Indigenous Languages, 2017. Retrieved from http://ausil.org/Dictionary/Wik-Mungkan/lexicon/mainintro.html.