A Cognitive Study of Conceptual Metaphors in English and Persian: Universal or Culture-Specific?

Abstract

In the last 2 decades, studies on conceptual metaphors have profoundly increased. The development in this field was followed by Lakoff and Johnson's (1980b) work on describing the conceptual role played by metaphors and their correspondence with language and thought. This study aimed to compare conceptual metaphors in Persian and English through a corpus-based approach as well as examining both the universality and culture-specificity of conceptual metaphors within Persian/English and describe in detail the Persian conception of some metaphorical concepts from the cognitive perspective. The cognitive theory of metaphor was resorted to and applied to a cross-cultural analysis of a randomly selected set of conceptual metaphors in English and Persian. To analyze the data, 12 conceptual metaphors introduced by Wright (1999) were investigated and gathered. Then, the metaphorical expressions in the 2 languages were grouped under their source and target domains. Results pointed to the fact that whereas there is a certain degree of universality in terms of the predominant conceptual metaphors, there are also variations between the 2 languages for cultural and linguistic reasons.