Colours in Everyday Metaphoric Language of Persian Speakers

Abstract

Metaphors are ubiquitous in language and integrated in different aspects of human life, involving thought, language and action (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Accordingly, metaphorical expressions have a key role in people's daily thinking and language use. Having interaction with things and people surrounding us, we have encyclopaedic knowledge embedded in our conceptual system (Kovecses, 2002). Metaphor and metonymy, two fundamental strategies of conceptualization, affect the way we perceive reality. In this respect, colour words strengthen language influence and have a significant role in convention of metaphorical and, particularly, metonymic expressions in our lives and everyday communications. Considering a cognitive approach and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Lakoff 2006, Kovecses 2010) into account, this paper aims to investigate the underlying conceptual meaning involved in the construction of Persian colour-based metaphors of emotion and body parts on one hand; and to survey the interplay of linguistic expressions and cultural knowledge on the other. To do so, we collected Persian instances from some Persian dictionaries. The working hypothesis is that although THE BODY IS A CONTAINER conceptual metaphor exists in all languages, the metaphoric expressions that fill the conceptual metaphor may be understood culturally.