ABSTRACT
This chapter moves away from the absolute and abstract universals proposed by most linguists to advance a concept of universals that is more statistical than absolute, and that is based more on our embodied experience in our natural and social environments than on an idealized mental faculty. Recognizing inputs from African languages and their speakers, the multicausal scenario adopted here asserts that no viable account of lexico-semantics in Afro-Atlantic colonial era contact repertoires is possible without also invoking the role of the embodied and contextualized imaginative processes of the human mind, such as metaphorical and metonymic reasoning.
