Abstract
Metaphor becomes the subject of interest for many researchers in recent decades. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the universality of emotion metaphorical conceptualization and the dominant pattern in English and Persian based on Kovecses’s (2003) model for Linguistic expression of Metaphor. The emotions under study were happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and love. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory was adopted as a model for the purpose of comparison. To do so, 782 emotive metaphorical expressions were compiled from different literary works and related articles on the field and Dictionaries in both languages. The study was conducted through two main phases of categorization and comparison. First expressions were categorized under their general and specific target and source domains. At the second phase, in each category, metaphorical expressions were compared with based on their conceptual metaphor and literal meaning. At this phase, three patterns of totally the same, partially the same, and totally different were identified. Also the results of Chi-Square applied to these three patterns demonstrate that anger ( = 108.85, P<0/000) was the most universal emotion, whereas sadness ( = 31.40, P< 0/000) was the least universal emotion during this study. In addition, the dominant pattern at the end of analysis was the pattern of totally the same.
Highlights
The research corpus was collected from several sources, from both written and spoken discourses in both English and Persian, including the works done by Lakoff and Kovecses on the field (Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Kovecses, 1983; Kovecses, 1990, 2005), British National Corpus (BNC), Persian Expressions were, in turn, extracted from Amsal-Al- Hekam (Dehkhoda,1960), Farhang-e Kenayat-e Sokhan (Hassan Anvary, 2004)
According to the above-stated comparative analyses of data, it can be concluded that there were some cultural differences in conceptualizing these five basic emotions- namely anger, happiness, sadness, fear, and love in English and Persian due to the emphasis laid on some aspects of metaphor and entailments, the two languages share most of the general conceptual metaphors in describing these five emotions
Most Persian metaphorical expressions of emotions can be literally rendered into English and vice versa and serve the same metaphorical meaning and effects
Summary
We use metaphors when we find it difficult to describe a thing or an experience. Current approaches in cognitive linguistics emphasize the importance of metaphor in language, and they consider it an essential and indispensable phenomenon in both language and thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1994). ISSN 1913-9020 E-ISSN 1913-9039 www.ccsenet.org/ies metaphors are used to make abstract notions more concrete. This cognitive process, “conceptualizing”, is employed to give any abstract notion such as emotional states a more physical and tangible essence or feeling. Since emotions are unobservable internal states, they are par excellence target domain to be expressed by means of metaphor
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