Abstract
It has been argued by linguists that language expresses a people's way of life; this paper examines a cultural-specific metaphor in Ekegusii, an African Bantu language in Kenya since a metaphor makes our thoughts clearer, richer with imagery, and, act as a conduit between human mind and culture. A qualitative research design was used in the collection of the metaphors from the two counties of Gusii, Nyamira and Kisii, where 60 native respondents were picked and asked to identify and explain terms and phrases that describe a woman in Ekegusii, describe the social-cultural values and explain the mapping processes involved. The data was analyzed by identifying qualities in the donor domains and mapping them to the recipient domain using the Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT). It is clear from the results that in Ekegusii, a woman is perceived as an object, a plant, an animal or the appropriate behavior she exhibits based on the values such as immorality, selfishness, beauty, ugliness, harshness, talkativeness, age, and faithfulness, and also, the cultural background plays an important role in the conceptualization and interpretation of these metaphors. Finally, we recommend more research of metaphors in other languages to enable comparisons.
Highlights
This is a paper on how the Abagusii community in Kenya perceive a woman in view of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) which is a major concern to cognitive linguists as they research on how language reflects people’s perception of the world
We will examine metaphors in Ekegusii that conceptualize the woman as animals, plants, objects or a name corresponding with the character exhibited using the social-cultural metaphor model, and discuss how well it can explain the mapping process involved
In the light of the present research, it is true that metaphors are plenty in Ekegusii and form networks by which we conceptualize a woman in concrete terms, that is, WOMEN ARE OBJECTS, WOMEN ARE PLANTS, WOMEN ARE ANIMALS AND WOMEN ARE THEIR BEHAVIOUR, based on qualities such as beauty, ugliness, harshness, talkativeness, wisdom, hypocrisy, age, and unfaithfulness
Summary
This is a paper on how the Abagusii community in Kenya perceive a woman in view of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) which is a major concern to cognitive linguists as they research on how language reflects people’s perception of the world. The Abagusii, just like other communities, are rich in culture From their history, there was a clear division of work between males and females. Many cognitive linguists have explored the subject of women and how they are perceived in different cultures. We present the Ekegusii social-cultural woman metaphors illustrating how they are formed and interpreted. This will add to the few Ekegusii cognitive linguistics works like that of Nyakoe et al (2012). The main part analyzes the data to illustrate various characteristics of Ekegusii woman metaphors and we present the conclusion
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