The Study of Semantic Usage of Flesh in Persian Proverbs and Idioms

Based on the assumption that various usage of words are motivated, the present sociolinguistic research has compiled and analyzed expressions containing the word flesh in Bijan-khan corpus and 18 different dictionaries and books of Persian idioms and proverbs, and by analyzing different meanings of flesh, the study has attempted to elicit and categorize meaning-triggers of its different usages. Accordingly, at first 28 different usage of the word flesh were identified, including muscle, precious thing, volume, nerve, halal, wound, and so on. Then, the total semantic triggers of these applications were categorized in seven categories of quantity, quality, interaction, form, place, ownership and value. The findings of this study show that the span of meaning-triggers of this concept is limited to the environmental, social, historical, and cultural constraints of the language community. This finding is in line with the results of previous research, and altogether is a clue to the general pattern of conceptualization of the linguistic system.