© 2015 Antonio Pamies, Lei Chunyi and Margaret Craig. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 license. Journal of Social Sciences Original Research Paper “Fruits are Results”: On the Interaction between Universal Archi-Metaphors, Ethno-Specific Culturemes and Phraseology Antonio Pamies, Lei Chunyi and Margaret Craig Department of General Linguistics, University of Granada, Spain Article history Received: 07-05-2015 Revised: 09-06-2015 Accepted: 09-06-2015 Corresponding Author: Antonio Pamies Department of General Linguistics, University of Granada, Spain antonio.pamies@gmail.com Abstract: This paper deals with the relation between language, culture and reality, as it manifests itself in figurative words, idioms and proverbs involving the concept of FRUIT in several language families. Some productive metaphoric macro-models are identified and analysed, archi- metaphors as well as culturemes, analysing how the “experiential” and “cultural” motivational backgrounds can interact. We also investigate how grammatical metaphors depend on the underlying images and how cognitive mappings can be reversed. Keywords: Metaphor, Cultureme, Phraseology, Ethnobotanics, Fruit Introduction This paper deals with the relation between language, culture and reality, as it manifests itself in figurative words, idioms and proverbs involving the concept of FRUIT, which works as an iconic model and as a cultureme, both on the level of the source and target domains of figurative expressions. The aim is to investigate, in different languages, some semantic and syntactic differences between potentially universal archi- metaphors and ethno-specific culturemes and, at the same time, to show that both categories may sometimes cooperate. Some productive metaphoric macro-models have been identified in several languages and cultures from Europe (Western, Southern and Eastern), Latin America, Middle East, Oceania and China. As a secondary goal, we investigate the influence of the semantic motivation on the syntactic restrictions into idiomatic constructional patterns. Section 1 opposes archi-metaphors and culturemes in theoretical phraseology. Sections 2, 3 and 4 analyze three productive archi-metaphors involving a fruit as a source domain, from a semantic and grammatical point of view (FRUITS ARE RESULTS, FRUITS ARE OFFSPRING, FRUITS ARE MOMENTS). Section 5 analyzes how culturally-bound metaphors attribute positive or negative connonations to a given fruit in different languages. Section 6 analyzes the reversal of the mapping, showing that the majority of fruit names are themselves metaphors and that their motivational background can be also “experiential”, “cultural”, or an interaction of both. Universal Vs. Ethno-Specific Metaphoric Models Since phraseological units are as numerous as words, probably more (Gross, 2012), their syntax and semantics should be described as a sub-system with its own level of linguistic analysis (Kunin, 1996; Mejri, 2006: 218). As far as semantics is concerned, an important analytical tool is the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), which allows us to analyze idiomatic meanings in a more systematic way than the traditional “atomized” treatment of figurative phrasemes, viewed as marginal exceptions, more or less picturesque and unpredictable. The undeniable contribution of cognitive approaches to phraseological studies was mainly orientated to metaphoric mappings with an experiential and/or perceptive background, such as up is good/down is bad; discussion is a war; etc, (Mellado Blanco, 2004; Gibbs, 2007). Later, attention was more focused on semantic models whose productivity depends on a culturally-bound basis (Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen, 2005), connecting language and the world vision embedded in each culture, according to the Russian neo- Humboldtian linguo-culturological tradition, but essentially focused on idioms and proverbs (Teliya, 1998; Dobrovol’skij, 1998; 2000; Piirainen, 2008; Luque Durán, 2007; Pamies, 2007; 2008; 2011; Pamies and Tutáeva, 2010; Luque Durán and Luque Nadal, 2008, among others). On the other hand, there is a tight relation between the semantic metaphoricity of idioms and their constructional defectivity; phrasemes can even been