How bloody is your vessel? ‘Contrastive idiomaticity’ among languages and cultures

Dealing with idioms, otherwise called templates, fixed or semi-fixed expressions in language in a contrastive perspective can be useful to promote linguistic and cultural awareness, mutual understanding, and inclusion. From a cognitive metaphor perspective, the interface between cultural variation and the universality of specific experiential and cognitive groundings and between motivation and linguistic variation are of great interest. This is especially true when considering linguistic relativism (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), embodiment, and emotion (Lakoff 1993; Kövecses 2000; Boroditsky 2001). In this paper we will compare an idiomatic expression such as “to burst a blood vessel”, commonly used by English speakers when experiencing anger, vs. similar expressions in French, Italian, and Arabic, to explore their potential metaphorical grounding, usage, and emotional impact with a quantitative and qualitative contrastive approach. The degrees to which variation and similarities among the chosen comparable idioms occur is what we call ‘contrastive idiomaticity’. How these languages relate to these idioms’ metaphorical groundings will also be discussed from a cross-cultural persuasion and sustainability perspective.