Health metaphors and embodiment in Arab economic discourse

This article is a corpus-based study that examines selected economic metaphors in Arabic with a view to ascertaining whether their presence in a non-Indo-European language can be explained in terms of universal embodied cognition. When exploring the relationship between certain bodily experiences and the corresponding metaphorical expressions in Arabic this paper addresses the following research questions: (1) What is the role of embodiment in Arab economic discourse? (2) Is Arab economic discourse in any way similar to its English counterpart? (3) If so, could any of these similarities be due to the influence of English? (4) If so, does that pose a challenge to the embodiment hypothesis?