People-related idioms in business English: etymological, cognitive and conceptual origins
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31558/1815-3070.2026.51.7Keywords:
business English, idiom, etymology, cultural source, cognitive mechanism, cognitive conceptual analysisAbstract
The article examines the etymological origins, cognitive mechanisms of formation, and conceptual models underlying English-language idioms denoting people in Business English discourse. The study adopts an integrated approach combining traditional etymological analysis, a typology of cognitive mechanisms involved in idiom formation, and the theory of conceptual metaphor. The analysis of etymological sources reveals that the most productive domains are everyday life and domestic experience (36.1%), professional and industrial spheres (20.2%), sports (8.2%), and biblical and literary sources (7%). The investigation of cognitive mechanisms of phraseologization demonstrates that metaphorization constitutes the dominant process (69.62%), encompassing zoomorphic, somatic, professional, domestic, colour-based, and size-related metaphors. Metonymization accounts for 5.7% of the corpus, structural variation for 11.39%, irony and secondary nomination for 4.43%, calquing and intercultural borrowings for 4.43%, while hybrid mechanisms also comprise 4.43%. The cognitive-conceptual analysis identified seven basic metaphorical models for conceptualizing a person: PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS, PEOPLE ARE OBJECTS/MATERIALS, PEOPLE ARE MACHINES/TOOLS, PEOPLE ARE PHYSICAL BODIES, PEOPLE ARE OBJECTS OF MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION, PEOPLE ARE SOCIALLY LABELED OBJECTS, and PEOPLE ARE ELEMENTS OF SPACE AND MOVEMENT.
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