The ‘heart’ in Buryat

The aim of our paper is to analyse and survey of metaphoric and metonymic use of Buryat zürxen ‘heart’ lexeme. In many cultures, the heart plays an important part as a conceived source of emotions and feelings, and it is certainly correctly described as a key ethno-psychological term in these cultures. There are no works on conceptualization of emotion via body parts in Buryat and there are very few comprehensive work in Mongolic and Turcic languages (such as Tatar, Turkish). In this pilot work we focus on figurative use of zürxen ‘heart’, and our aim is to categorize the recognized constructions. As we demonstrate, Buryat shows some similar patterns with Turcic languages and other languages of the area where the Buryat language is spoken, but a detailed description, especially in the case of other Mongolic languages, is still missing. At the same time, it seems that there also differences as compared to its closest contact languages, Russian and Chinese, however it requires further research.