Introduction. Idioms are an attractive source of investigation due to the fact
that they keep the memory of historical and everyday events of a nation through
centuries. There are a lot of definitions of idioms by different scholars, and the
majority of these define idioms as semantically complex, compositionally permanent,
morphologically and syntactically fixed. There may be exceptions to the general rule:
some idioms appear to vary lexically, morphologically and syntactically. But the
semantic structure of idioms is not subject to semantic variation [1]; it is not derived
from the meaning of its constituents. Two types of idioms are generally identified -
transparent idioms the meaning of which can be easily guessed, and opaque ones the
components of which do not contribute to the idiom‘s meaning [2-3]. Words that
make up idioms lose their literal meanings and all together contribute to an ultimately
generalized meaning. The aim of the present research is to investigate the concepts of body parts; the
object of this study is metaphorically motivated English and Turkish idioms with
body part components, i.e., noun idioms which contain the following words in their
structure: arm/hand, ear(s), eye(s), foot/leg, head, heart, mouth, nose, stomach, and
tongue. For the purposes of the analysis and comparison of their conceptual and
image-schematic base idioms were taken from the sites with English and Turkish
idioms which mostly match each other in the number of idioms as a whole, and the
number of idioms with body part components, in particular. English idioms were
taken from http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/cat/9.html site; the total
number of idioms is 3,634, including 446 idioms with body part components. Turkish
idioms were taken from http://www.edebiyatfakultesi.com/deyimler_a.htm site;
the total number of idioms is 2,919, and the quantity of idioms with body part
components is 416. These sites were selected out of a series of other ones due to the
fact that the approximate number of idioms and those with body parts are comparable
in both sites. The proportion of idioms with body part components is comparably
equal - 12% and 14%, correspondingly.