Putting Your Ass on the Line : The Conceptualization of Risk in English and Spanish

Abstract: The present study sets out to shed light on the conceptualization of risk in two different languages, English and Spanish. In order to reveal how risk is perceived in the minds of speakers of the two languages, I undertook a comprehensive cross-linguistic survey of the conceptual metaphors related to risk-taking. This was done through the examination of the conventional collocations of the noun and the verb risk in English, and the noun riesgo and the verb arriesgar(se) in Spanish. In addition, I also focused on the analysis of the idioms that deal with risk and risk-taking in both languages. This contrastive cross-cultural linguistic study of the conceptual field of risk and risk-taking was conducted within the frameworks of corpus linguistics as well as cognitive linguistics, which means that I worked with naturally occurring data gathered from various corpora while using the conceptual theory of metaphor for the analysis of potential conceptual metaphors related to risk.