SEMANTIC SHIFTS OF TRADITIONAL SOMATIC IDIOMS IN POST-MILLENNIAL GERMAN NOVELS

This article examines how traditional somatic idioms — expressions that encode bodily experience such as einen kühlen Kopf bewahren, Schmetterlinge im Bauch haben, or auf den Magen schlagen — undergo semantic realignment in German novels published since ca. 2000. By combining insights from cognitive metaphor theory, historical semantics, and close literary reading, I trace several recurrent tendencies: semantic bleaching and conventionalization, ironic literalization, medicalization and biopolitical re-signification, and pragmatic redeployment as discourse markers. The analysis argues that these changes are not accidental but systematic responses to shifting cultural contexts (biomedicine, digital embodiment, migration, and the aesthetic strategies of contemporary narrators).