Structural Metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an with Reference to Their Realizations in English

Abstract

This study sets out to investigate  structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur’an within the framework of  conceptual metaphor theory. It represents  part of our experience from a cognitive semantic perspective. Structural metaphors are used to structure and understand the abstract concepts in terms of more clear and delineated ones. Structural metaphors  perform an important function when they are used in The Glorious Qur'an, in that It is characterized by Its uniqueness, style and its aesthetic and rhetoric structures. Structural  metaphors play an essential role in opening  new horizons for readers to understand the deeper meanings of the Qura'nic  Ayas  which are used metaphorically in order to give a specific significance whether intellectual, psychological or aesthetic. This study comes to investigate structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an.  It is hypothesized that structural  metaphors are commonly used in The Glorious Qur'an. Structural  metaphors are used in The Glorious Qur'an to facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones. It is also hypnotized that the use of structural  metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an is meant to meet specific rhetorical meanings.
         To carry out the present study,  nine Ayas from The Glorious Qur'an are studied with the analysis of three different translations to check to what extent these translations give equivalent translations to structural metaphors. These translations are Pickthall (1930), Ali (1987) and Al-Hilali and Khan (1996). The most important conclusions of this  study are: 1)structural metaphors have a decisive role in determining the precise meaning of the Qur'anic texts and 2) among the semantic significances employed by these metaphors, intellectual significances are used  abundantly.