Semantic extension of ‘front’ and ‘back’ and the Front-over-Back asymmetry in Thai and Korean

Despite wide variations in language, conceptual constants and universals persist. Among these are the spatial notions of Front and Back as basic principles of human conceptualization. However, these notions develop into a range of different, yet related, designations across diverse ontological categories (Heine et al. 1991. Grammaticalization: A conceptual framework . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Spatial relationships often take the form of polar opposition, such as Front versus Back, Top versus Bottom, Inside versus Outside, Source versus Goal, etc. Despite their seemingly equal salience, the use of lexemes encoding polar concepts is not symmetrical in linguistic manifestations. Some early research by Andersen (1978. Lexical universals of body-part terminology. In Joseph Greenberg (ed.), Universals of human language, vol. 3, word structure , 335–368. Stanford: Stanford University Press), Heine (1997. Cognitive foundations of grammar . Oxford: Oxford University Press), and others has already noted the presence of such asymmetries in language, while recently a body of research has focused on Goal-over-Source asymmetry. This paper investigates the Front-Back axis in Thai and Korean, drawing upon diverse sources, and reports that there exists the Front-over-Back (FOB) asymmetry in these two typologically different languages. In particular, this paper shows that the FOB asymmetry involves different degrees of conceptual granularity and, more prominently, pragmatic salience of the two polar spatial concepts. Further, from a contrastive linguistic perspective, this paper argues that Thai and Korean resort to fundamentally distinct lexicalization strategies, upholding similar findings in extant comparative research.