ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the conceptual status of body-based tropes in Kriol. It discusses evidence from metalinguistic discussions where speakers explicitly embrace and describes the conceptual association between emotions and the belly. In Kriol gestures, the heart was the most frequent bodily association with emotions – more frequent than the belly association, although the belly prevails over the heart in lexicalized collocations. Heart-related gestures are inherently indexical to the extent that they point at an organ, but in Kriol their locations and hand shapes are regular enough to consider these gestures conventionalized. The analysis of figurative representations of emotions in Kriol and Dalabon suggests that the context of language shift, conceptual figurative representations of emotions are not immediately dependent upon linguistic forms: conceptual representations can persist when their linguistic instantiations have largely disappeared. Linguistic figurative representations of emotions appear to be sensitive to linguistic parameters such as the dynamics of language contact, or the typological profiles of the languages in co-presence.
