CONCEPTUALISATIONS AND SEMANTIC EXTENSIONS OF SAR ‘HEAD’ IN BALOCHI: A CULTURAL LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This study explores the cultural conceptualisations of sar ‘head’ in the Balochi language, highlighting its central role as a salient body part in meaning construction. Drawing on the framework of Cultural Linguistics, the analysis demonstrates that sar functions as a productive source domain for expressing a wide range of abstract and culturally embedded concepts. It is metaphorically and metonymically employed to conceptualise notions such as leadership, authority, and mental states, reflecting its prominence as the most visible and symbolically loaded part of the human body. The findings further reveal that sar is understood as a container of cognitive capacities, including reasoning, understanding, and memory, aligning with broader embodiment patterns observed across languages. Additionally, the study shows that sar is culturally associated with honour and integrity, functioning metonymically as an index of personal and social value. Beyond its figurative uses, sar also operates in grammatical and functional domains, serving as a prepositional marker indicating spatial relations and as a symbolic unit of measurement. Overall, the research underscores the multifaceted role of sar in Balochi, demonstrating how language encodes cultural knowledge and embodied experience through body-part expressions. The study contributes to the theoretical development of Cultural Linguistics by extending its application to the underexplored Balochi language and by demonstrating how embodied experiences are culturally constructed and interpreted through shared cultural conceptualisations and cultural cognition.