Cleanliness is next to godliness? Clean and dirty metaphors in English and Serbian

Abstract

The current paper explores how the bodily experience of physical cleanliness is used in reasoning about abstract notions in English and Serbian. The focus is on adjectives and nouns in the two languages describing the state of cleanliness or its absence and the way they extend their meaning into abstract domains. Analysis is performed within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, with examples collected from representative linguistic corpora of English and Serbian. Due to the high presence of cleanliness in ordinary experience, it serves as the source domain for structuring various abstract concepts, which predominantly pertain to morality. The concluding part discusses identified conceptual mappings and contrasts English and Serbian with respect to these.