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Apart from emotions strictly speaking, body-part expressions are also used by speakers of Australian Indigenous languages to talk about people’s emotional dispositions – in other words, their temperament. One type of disposition often expressed with body parts is sociability, or people’s attitudes toward others: whether they are agreeable, compliant, generous, i.e. kind and socially adequate, or on the contrary stubborn, selfish, and generally unkind. Such meanings are particularly frequent with body parts that are also linked with the intellect; primarily the head and forehead, but also the ear, which commonly represents the mind and the function of understanding in Australian Indigenous languages.

Hear, understand, comply

With the ear, we find mostly negative attitudes such as uncooperativeness, stubbornness and so on. This reflects that in many languages across the Australian continent, hearing and understanding are associated not only with each other, but jointly, with obedience. As a result, many expressions meaning literally ‘without ears’ have the sense ‘deaf’; they can in turn be used to describe people who are disobedient and, more generally, socially noncompliant. This can be illustrated with Kaurna (South Australia) for instance, where yuritina, literally ‘ear-without’ means ‘deaf; disobedient; stubborn’. The metaphor at play here is grounded in the idea that someone without ears will not hear and therefore will not obey (a child, for instance). By extension, then, they will be socially uncooperative. There are also expressions describing the ears as ‘blunt’ or ‘hard’, like in Warlpiri (Central Australia), where langa pati ‘ear hard’ means ‘obstinate, disobedient, wilful, stubborn’. As for positive expressions, there are meanings like ‘well-behaved’, ‘well-mannered’ or ‘attentive’ for instance, but the forms we found did not allow us to identify the exact metaphors.

Kindness as social awareness

Unlike with the ear, the association of the head and forehead with (mostly negative) social attitudes is not related to auditory perception and obedience. Instead, it seems likely that it results from seeing kindness as a sign of one’s social awareness, which, in turn, is seen as a sign of intelligence. As a result, being unkind, uncooperative etc. betrays a lacking intellect. This explains the high representation of expressions meaning agreeable or disagreeable, compliant or noncompliant etc., with the head and the forehead, since they are treated as loci of intellectual functions. These body parts tend to map onto negative rather than positive attitudes, especially for the head. As for metaphors, by far the most frequent evocation is hardness of the head/forehead, with expressions translated mostly as ‘stubborn’, as well as ‘impudent’ or ‘intractable’. In Wik Mungkan (Cape York) for instance, kuchek-thayan, literally ‘head hard/strong’ means ‘stubborn’.

Being unkind: selfishness

Expressions with the nose also display a strong association with unkindness, though their emphasis differs slightly. Along with a large number of expressions describing sulkiness, the nose is used to describe egocentrism and selfishness, typically people who avoid sharing things with others. The expressions for this personality trait or disposition often invoke the size of the nose – big, long, sharp etc. – as well as, occasionally, movement – e.g. ‘turn nose up’. We find for instance buladu-gaang ‘big nose’ for ‘greedy’ in Woiwurrung (Victoria) and mulya nyangarrpari ‘nose turn up’ for ‘selfish, egotistic person who refuses to share food’ in Kukatja (Western Desert). These metaphors are the same as with sulkiness, which suggests that the association of the nose with selfishness derives from its association with sulkiness.

 A few other body parts regularly link to selfishness or lack of generosity as an emotional disposition. One of them is the bottom, as in Kaytetye (Central Australia), where a ‘rude’ expression meaning ‘hard bottom’ is used to talk about people who are selfish or ‘greedy’. The hands can also describe generosity, for the obvious reason that they are typically involved in giving, and conversely they can associate with selfishness: for instance Guugu Yimidhirr (Cape York) mangal burrburr ‘hand hard’ for ‘stingy, ungenerous’. The belly associates with lack of generosity as well, corresponding to lack of compassion, which has a salient association with the belly. Belly expressions that denote lack of generosity can also mean ‘uncaring’. They often invoke metaphoric hardness, as a counterpart of the softness association with compassion and sympathy. However, expressions that denote such negative attitudes remain marginal with the belly, and even more so with other abdominal parts (the heart, liver, chest and other parts of the torso).

References

Amery, Rob. Emotion Metaphors in an Awakening Language: Kaurna the language of the Adelaide Plains. Paper presented at the 2017 Australian Linguistics Society Conference, Sydney, Australia, 2017.

Blake, Barry J. Woiwurrung: The Melbourne language. The handbook of Australian languages, 4, 30-122, 1991.

Haviland, John. “Guugu Yimidhirr.” In The Handbook of Australian Languages (vol 1), edited by Robert M. W. Dixon and Barry J. Blake, 27-180. Canberra: the Australian National University Press, 1979.

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.

Laughren, Mary and Warlpiri lexicography group. Warlpiri-English encyclopaedic dictionary. Electronic draft, October 2017, 2007.

Peile, Anthony R. Body and soul: An Aboriginal view. Victoria Park, WA: Hesperian Press, 1997.

Ross, Alison and Myfany Turpin. Kaytetye to English Dictionary. Alice Springs, N. T.: IAD Press, 2012.