Our purpose in the present paper is to look into the process of metaphorization of names of body parts in Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac, as it is reflected in various literary sources and lexicographical works, from the viewpoint of their relevance for the mental shaping of different concepts having various degrees of abstractness, ranging from concepts directly related to space to those pertaining to the realm of human emotions. We have adopted as a tool of analysis for this purpose the theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson about conceptual metaphor, of which parts that are relevant for our topic will be exposed in the next section.
The three languages involved in this research have been selected not on the basis of some special representativity they would be entitled to claim for the Semitic group as opposed to other languages belonging to it, but mainly because they all have acquired, within the boundaries of their respective cultural areas, the status of classical, literary and liturgical languages, which made them privileged, if not exclusive, tools of expression for a large amount of literary works, unlike some other Semitic languages, dead or alive, much more poorly and sporadically attested. Moreover, these languages also represent, in their written form, something of a temporal and spatial continuum, given that the Hebrew biblical writings, the main source on the basis of which a classical norm for this language was built, seem to have taken shape within the boundaries of the first millennium BC, Syriac flourished during the first half of the first millennium AD and written Arabic began to be heavily attested from the 7th century onwards; as for the areas in which they have developed, they are also contingent, stretching from the Arabic peninsula to the Fertile Crescent, and at times even overlapping each other.