Metaphors in “The Elements of Language” by E.Sapir

Abstract

The research is aimed at identifying metaphors and building metaphorical models underlying the scientific article on linguistics "The Elements of Language" by E.Sapir on the grounds of cognitive linguistics. It also provides classification and analysis of the metaphors used in the scientific text under question and correlation of the researcher's metaphorical models with the core ones in Linguistics. The methodology is based on the cognitive principle that each scientific text has a sense productive structure, derivative from a scientific cognitive and communicative situation, with particular stages of sense development represented in all subtexts of the scientific text. Cognitive and linguistic analyses are procedures used to identify the subtexts, metaphors (Steen 2002), to analyse and classify the latter and to build metaphorical models. The analysis revealed that E.Sapir uses mostly three kinds of metaphors: dead, conventional scientific and original (his own). Dead metaphors dominate in all the subtexts of the article. The most frequent and sense developing metaphorical models are the ones referring to Human and Nature and to Human and Results of Labour. Keywords: metaphor, metaphorical model, scientific text, subtext, linguistics, sapir