Embodied Measurement and Cultural Cognition in Kazakh and English Mesurative Idioms: A Comparative Body–Mind–Culture Perspective

Objective: This study compared Kazakh and English mesurative idioms to examine how bodily, perceptual, and sociocultural experiences shape figurative representations of measurable phenomena.  

Methods and Materials:  A comparative linguocultural and cognitive-semantic design was employed. Mesurative idioms were collected from Kazakh phraseological and explanatory dictionaries, literary and folklore materials, scholarly sources, and English idiom dictionaries, explanatory dictionaries, and corpus-based resources. Each expression was coded according to semantic domain, mesurative component, literal and figurative meaning, evaluative connotation, embodied or perceptual basis, and cultural motivation. Descriptive, contrastive, componential-semantic, linguocultural, and cognitive analyses were then conducted.   

Findings: Five principal domains emerged: temporal span, size and quantity, distance and space, money and value, and age and life stage. Across both languages, literal measures frequently underwent semantic transformation into relative and evaluative meanings such as near/far, short/long, small/large, and light/heavy. Particularly in spatial and temporal idioms, bodily reach, visual perception, movement, recurrent activities, and culturally familiar actions served as cognitive reference points. Kazakh expressions were more strongly associated with pastoral practices, traditional temporal routines, and culturally embedded spatial experience, whereas English expressions more often drew on monetary, conventional measurement, and everyday spatial imagery.

Conclusion:  Mesurative idioms demonstrate how apparently quantitative concepts are transformed through embodied perception and culturally organized experience. Rather than functioning merely as lexical remnants of measurement systems, these expressions reveal an interaction among bodily experience, cognitive representation, and cultural memory. The findings support an interdisciplinary understanding of phraseology as a domain in which body, mind, and culture jointly shape the linguistic construction of human experience.