The Linguistic Image of the Body in the Surayt Dialect among Western Assyrians of Ṭūr cAbdīn1

The Tur Abdin dialect has many idiomatic expressions formed in relation to body parts. They serve to express feelings, evaluate manners, underline personal characteristics, describe social interactions and assess the behavior of a person. They can showcase various images of interpersonal contacts with an unlimited temporal scope. The linguistic image of the body which has developed in this language has been researched by only a few specialists. When it comes to the sequences of words that build a metaphor, there is no firm rule; the first word may be a verb or a noun. In many cases it seems that the verb, which is the active element of the saying, is improper, inadequate, not well chosen, because it usually has a different meaning in the formal language. For this work to be transparent, the 177 sayings have been transcribed and translated the way they are understood by speakers (not literally), as well as glossed in detail. All organs of the body that appear in the metaphors, which are thirty, have been listed in a table according to decreasing frequency of usage and in alphabetical order.