Masoumeh Zarei; Shahla Raghib Dust
Abstract
Color terms are radiation of the human conceptual system that represents a reflection of his cognitive and linguistic features. The human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and one of the linguistic strategies that can play a part in color term ...
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Color terms are radiation of the human conceptual system that represents a reflection of his cognitive and linguistic features. The human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and one of the linguistic strategies that can play a part in color term formation and categorical extension of colors. This study has taken metaphor in Persian color terms and the metaphorical structure of color categories in the Persian language into consideration. In this study, based on cognitive lexical semantics, 910 color terms in Persian have been analyzed. After describing semantic domains in the metaphorical formation of Persian color terms and analyzing the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms, the frequency of semantic domains’ application in Persian color terms and color categories’ tendency for participation in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms have been investigated. Metaphor is one of the cognitive mechanisms that have a significant role in forming color categories and their conceptual extension in Persian. The domains whose phenomena have been observed in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms are plant domain, animal domain, food domain, body domain, mineral domain, natural phenomenon domain, and object domain. The frequency of application and distribution of these semantic domains in Persian color categories is not equal. Besides, the rate of color categories’ participation in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms and their tendency to the source semantic domains vary in metaphorical mapping.
Introduction
Color terms are radiation of the human conceptual system that represents a reflection of his cognitive and linguistic features. Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and one of the linguistic strategies that can play a part in color term formation and categorical extension of colors. This study has considered metaphor in Persian color terms and the metaphorical structure of color categories in the Persian language. In this research, we attempted to provide answers to the following questions:
How is the metaphorical structure of color categories in the Persian language?
What are the source domains in the metaphorical mapping of concepts in Persian color terms?
What is the contribution of color categories to the metaphorical structure and the extent of their tendency to the semantic domains in Persian color terms?
Literature Review
Conklin (1955) studied color categories in the Hanunóo language. Berlin and Kay (1969) argued that all languages share a universal system of basic color categorization that has evolved in 7 stages. Rosch (1973) studied the color terms of the Dani language. Levinson (2000) categorizes color propositions in the Yélî language. Everett (2005) believes that there are considerable differences in the way colors are named among the speakers of the Pirahã language. Xing (2009) investigated color terms in Chinese. Gol-Mohammadzadeh (2009) studied the symbolic meaning of color terms among Persian speakers. Estaji (2007) investigated Persian color terms structurally. Afrashi and Samet (2012) studied the conceptual metaphors of color in the Persian language. Alizadeh Sahrai and Raskhmahand (2016) investigated the hierarchy of basic color words in Persian.
Methodology
This research was based on a fieldwork study and the data was collected from different social-cultural contexts in the Persian-speaking society. In this study, we examined 910 color terms descriptively and statistically, within the scope of cognitive lexical semantics and the theoretical beliefs of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In this research, we investigated the metaphorical structure of color categories and the formation of Persian color terms through the cognitive mechanism of metaphorical mapping.
Results
The analysis of the research data shows that in the metaphorical structure of color categories, due to the similarity of an area of the color spectrum to a phenomenon in the surrounding world, the name of that phenomenon is used for the lexical encoding of that area in the color spectrum. There is a general metaphor in the formation of Persian color terms and their categorization: the radiating color phenomenon is color (see the figure below).
Figure 1
The general conceptual metaphor of color in the Persian language
source domain target domain
radiating color phenomenon
color
mapping
This general metaphor is made of a set of radiating color phenomena that create a cluster of “convergent cognitive models” together. This cluster radially causes the formation of a set of convergent subcategories in the color categories, which are: color is plant, color is animal, color is body, color is food, color is mineral, color is natural phenomenon, and color is object. The models of this cluster are shown in the figure below:
Figure 2
The cluster of metaphorical cognitive models
source domains target domains
color
color
color
color
color
color
color
plant
animal
body
comestible
mineral
natural phenomenon
object
mappings
These cognitive models are semantic source domains in the metaphorical mapping of 910 Persian color terms. Figure (3) illustrates the distribution of these domains in the metaphorical mapping of Persian color terms:
Figure 3
the distribution of semantic domains in the metaphorical mapping
Generally, the distribution of these semantic domains in Persian color categories is not the same as the following table shows:
Table 1
The distribution of the semantic domain in color categories
color categories
plant
animal
mineral
natural phenomenon
food
body
object
blue
2%
6%
6%
18%
3%
5%
0%
purple
8%
2%
1%
0%
0%
0%
0%
gray
0%
12%
15%
9%
1%
3%
12%
yellow
17%
10%
18%
8%
10%
23%
14%
green
21%
13%
10%
5%
1%
5%
5%
red
19%
12%
15%
15%
25%
28%
7%
white
3%
9%
10%
14%
17%
8%
26%
black
2%
8%
4%
12%
0%
5%
9%
pink
9%
1%
3%
3%
9%
10%
5%
brown
12%
15%
10%
6%
33%
15%
9%
orange
6%
2%
7%
5%
0%
0%
0%
polycolor
1%
9%
2%
5%
0%
0%
14%
In addition to the non-uniformity of the frequency of the use of semantic domains in color categories, the participation rate of each of these color categories in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms:
Figure 5
The participation rate of color categories
The tendency of each of these color categories to the source semantic domains in the metaphorical mapping is also different. The following table shows the contribution of color categories in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms and the tendency of each of them to the source semantic domains in the metaphorical mapping:
Table 2
The contribution and tendency of color categories
color categories
plant
animal
mineral
natural phenomenon
food
body
object
blue
10%
21%
16%
45%
4%
4%
0%
purple
85%
9%
6%
0%
0%
0%
0%
gray
1%
34%
34%
20%
1%
1%
9%
yellow
43%
14%
19%
8%
5%
7%
4%
green
58%
20%
11%
6%
1%
2%
2%
red
41%
14%
13%
12%
%11
7%
2%
white
12%
19%
16%
22%
14%
4%
13%
black
17%
28%
11%
32%
0%
4%
8%
pink
57%
4%
8%
8%
11%
8%
4%
brown
33%
21%
11%
7%
20%
5%
3%
orange
49%
10%
23%
18%
0%
0%
0%
polycolor
14%
55%
10%
21%
0%
0%
0%
Conclusion
Metaphor is one of the cognitive mechanisms that play a great role in the formation of color categories and their conceptual extension in the Persian language. In the metaphorical structure of color categories in Persian, the concept of the surrounding phenomena domain is exactly mapped to the domain of color. The similarity between phenomenon and color is lexically encoded by color-term-forming affixes and morphemes of the Persian language. In Persian color terms, metaphor functions paradigmatically and there is a one-to-one correspondence between the concept of phenomenon and the concept of color. The domains that have been observed in the metaphorical structure of Persian are, in order of maximum, as follows: plant domain, animal domain, food domain, body domain, mineral domain, natural phenomenon domain, and object domain.
There is a non-uniformity in the degree of distribution of these semantic domains in different categories; the presence of some of them is more prominent in some color categories and insignificant in others. Furthermore, the percentage of color categories’ participation in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms and their tendency to the source domains in the metaphorical mapping are also different. Plant is the most prototypical semantic domain in the metaphorical structure of Persian color categories and green, red, and yellow categories are the prototypical categories in the semantic domain of plant.
Seyede Sahar Javid; Jalal Rahimian; Amirsaeid Moloodi; Alireza Khormaee
Abstract
The present study aims at examining the possible relation between metaphor and impoliteness in the context of interpersonal media gossip. To this end, we collected data related to 20 celebrities (10 actors and 10 actresses) regarding 60 linguistic situations that occurred from August 2018 to April 2020. ...
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The present study aims at examining the possible relation between metaphor and impoliteness in the context of interpersonal media gossip. To this end, we collected data related to 20 celebrities (10 actors and 10 actresses) regarding 60 linguistic situations that occurred from August 2018 to April 2020. Words under examination were 51449. According to the findings of the study, human conceptualization based on source domains such as shit/ animal waste matter, useless things, cartoon/ fictional characters, useless money, dirty substance, imaginary/ metaphysical beings, mushroom, bread, weekdays, fat, and disease/blight were accompanied by impoliteness. These findings justify the role of impoliteness in confirming the direct relation between metaphor and impoliteness to the extent that human is considered as one of the above domains. Interpersonal media gossip prepares the grounds for the use of 345 metaphors along with impoliteness which has its roots in special features of this type of gossip. Among all source domains, concepts such as shit/ animal waste matter are of the highest frequencies. Among impoliteness strategies related to naming, one must point to the negative impoliteness sub-strategy. Language users attempt to hurt the positive face of people from themselves by using positive impoliteness.
Mhammad Hadi Fallahi; Marzieh Yarizadeh
Abstract
The aim of this research was to study language functions of the right hemisphere of the brain in the left hemisphere–damaged patients and compare them with healthy people. In this research, which is kind of Descriptive-Analytical, upon random sampling, two groups of the left hemisphere–damaged ...
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The aim of this research was to study language functions of the right hemisphere of the brain in the left hemisphere–damaged patients and compare them with healthy people. In this research, which is kind of Descriptive-Analytical, upon random sampling, two groups of the left hemisphere–damaged patients (20 men &10 women) were selected among people referred to Imam Reza Neuro Clinic, as well as 30 healthy people. Then tests of Right Hemisphere Language Collection (Brian, 1995) and test of Application Acts &Competency of Language (Mehri, 1381) were used, to compare patients' language functions with those of healthy people. The results of the research were analyzed. Analysis of data includes two parts: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics. The results of the research show that there are no significant differences between healthy and damaged people in view of sex, but there are significant differences between healthy and damaged people in 1-Metaphire test, 2-Written Metaphor test, 3-Comprehension of inferred meaning, 4-Appreciation of humor, 5-Lexical-semantic test, 6-Methapor production test, 7-Written proverb test, 8-Proverb production test, 9-Indirect speech acts test. These results indicate that abilities are not specific to the right hemisphere because people whose left hemisphere is damaged suffer from these disorders, too.
Ameneh Karimi; Gholam Hosain Karimi Dootan
Abstract
The aim of the study is to investigate Malekshahi Kurdish metaphorical idioms with body part “dam”. Malekshahi is one main part of the Southern Kurdish in Ilam province. The data is collected from native speakers of Malekshahi Kurdish. A common part of metaphorical idioms of Malekshahi is ...
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The aim of the study is to investigate Malekshahi Kurdish metaphorical idioms with body part “dam”. Malekshahi is one main part of the Southern Kurdish in Ilam province. The data is collected from native speakers of Malekshahi Kurdish. A common part of metaphorical idioms of Malekshahi is investigated in the present research with a focus on two body parts “mouth” and “face” conceptualization, in light of cognitive semantic. Based on the research findings, a significant part of the metaphors has a structural nature. “Chewing”, “war”, “fire eruption” and “captivity” are some source domains and “debate”, “freedom”, “disregard”, “secrecy” and “sorrow” are some target domains of these metaphors. “container”, “volcano”, “animate”, “cage”, “respect” and “claim” are some cited mappings for word “dam” in Malekshahi Kurdish metaphors. The findings also show that “war” is the most frequent source domain and “heed” is the most frequent target domain in these metaphorical idioms. Differences between the frequency occurrence of these two domains arises from various mapping in frequent domains.
Golnaz Ghafourisaleh; Foroogh Kazemi
Abstract
The use of metaphor as a linguistic strategy has long been considered by politicians around the world. The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the function of conceptual metaphor from the perspective of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in the speeches of three members of the Government of prudence ...
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The use of metaphor as a linguistic strategy has long been considered by politicians around the world. The main purpose of the present study is to investigate the function of conceptual metaphor from the perspective of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in the speeches of three members of the Government of prudence and hope: Mr. Rouhani, Jahangiri and Zarif. The main issue of the research is to show how conceptual metaphors are expressed in the words of these political authorities and how their function in organizing political realities can be explained. For this purpose, we have collected the data in a library research method and examined it analytically. The results indicate that political metaphors are used in different source domains: route, personification (humans, animals and plants), war, sports, buildings and natural phenomena, among which, the route is the most And the natural phenomena has had the least use. The results show that metaphor has an important rhetorical and persuasive usage in political discourse and plays an important role in conveying the political messages of prudence and hope government’s members. What is clear is that metaphor, in addition to facilitating the analysis of political issues for the audience, has given these politicians the opportunity to more easily explain their issues in order to arouse the audience's emotions. With the help of metaphor, they try to highlight or hide some aspects of political discourse so that they can persuade the audience to apply their beliefs. It should be said that conceptual metaphors with different appearances have been manifested in line with the purposes of the government of Prudence and Hope discourse, called Moderation discourse. Thus, metaphors can be used by journalists, political analysts, and political discourse researchers as an effective and powerful tool to analyze the messages of political officials and facilitate the decoding of their words. Therefore, the results of this study can be useful for this group of experts and ultimately to measure the political pulse of the country.
Ghazal Baghbani; Fatemeh Karampour
Abstract
Idioms are an inseparable part of any language. Therefore, people frequently use them in everyday speech. Since idioms have complex semantic structures, in order to understand their meaning and main message, one needs to use their allegorical meaning depending on the different semantic fields to which ...
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Idioms are an inseparable part of any language. Therefore, people frequently use them in everyday speech. Since idioms have complex semantic structures, in order to understand their meaning and main message, one needs to use their allegorical meaning depending on the different semantic fields to which they belong. In this research, authors tried to explain the concepts of Persian idioms with the help of Conceptual Blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner (2002). This research method is a qualitative one. Authors consider numerous idioms in Persian language but due to the limitations they had in data analysis, they selected 15 of the most frequent ones among them and used them in this research. The results revealed that we can explain and describe the idioms on the basis of the Conceptual Blending theory; in this way and by conceptually combining the elements of illustration with the figurative atmosphere which exists in the idioms, we can understand their meanings and intentions.
Abbas Ali Ahangar; Mohammad Amir Mashhadi; Somayyeh Dahmardeh Behrooz
Abstract
The aim of the present study study is to describe and analyze the conceptual domains used in metaphors of Saadi’s Boostan based on conceptual blending theory as presented by Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002). This theory uses mental spaces to describe and analyze metaphors that are two input spaces: ...
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The aim of the present study study is to describe and analyze the conceptual domains used in metaphors of Saadi’s Boostan based on conceptual blending theory as presented by Fauconnier and Turner (1998, 2002). This theory uses mental spaces to describe and analyze metaphors that are two input spaces: a generic space and a blended space. In this research the mental spaces of each metaphor in Saadi’s Boostan are described to determine which conceptual domains are involved in the construction of mental spaces in each metaphor. Then, the significance or non-significance of using these conceptual domains are measured using X2 test in SPSS. The results show that the conceptual domains used in the metaphors of Saadi’s Boostan can be grouped into 13 groups: (1) personification, (2) journey for the life concept, (3) using orientation for positive and negative entities, (4) natural phenomena, (5) animals, (6) tastes, (7) agriculture (8) body organs, (9) being containment by non-containers, (10) things, (11) actions, (12) human characters, and (13) locations. When constructing metaphors, these conceptual domains are embedded in an input space and together with the other input space intended by the poet, are projected into a blended space and make a metaphor. The results show that all the metaphors of Saadi’s Boostan can be described and analyzed based on conceptual domains in constructing the mental spaces suggested in conceptual blending theory
Raheleh Gandomkar
Abstract
Conceptual Metaphor Theory was first proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980 as one of the earliest theoretical frameworks of the cognitive semantics. Although it is not a novel view of metaphor and its tradition goes back to the historical-philological semantics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory ...
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Conceptual Metaphor Theory was first proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980 as one of the earliest theoretical frameworks of the cognitive semantics. Although it is not a novel view of metaphor and its tradition goes back to the historical-philological semantics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory attempts to adduce different kinds of evidence for the conceptual nature of metaphors. According to this theory, metaphors are not just rhetorical, but human thought is metaphorical in nature and conceptual structures are organized according to cross-domain mappings or correspondences between these domains. However, conceptual metaphors are made based on embodied experiences and human interaction with the world. According to this view, conceptual metaphors are unidirectional and they cannot be bi-directional. The present study criticizes the methodology with which metaphor is studied emphasizing bi-directionality of mapping instead of unidirectionality based on examples of spoken Persian. Also, the study points to the fact that there is no constraint on forming the conceptual metaphors and that everybody can add new conceptual metaphors of special domains.
saeede shoja razavi
Abstract
Whereas Persian bilingual children in kindergartens make their best attempts to properly apply language rules, they cannot be as successful in understanding and applying metaphorical phrases as Persian monolingual children. The present study, therefore, adopting cognitive- sociolinguistics perspective, ...
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Whereas Persian bilingual children in kindergartens make their best attempts to properly apply language rules, they cannot be as successful in understanding and applying metaphorical phrases as Persian monolingual children. The present study, therefore, adopting cognitive- sociolinguistics perspective, sought to study the bilingual factor in the level of comprehension and application of metaphorical expressions of these children. The methodology of this research was descriptive-experimental. The study was based on the Bialka-Pikul’s (2003) approach. It was found that bilingual children expressed more equalities than monolingual children in the metaphorical idiomatic expressions questionnaire and responded better than them. In the dual card test, bilingual children had the highest score in the metaphor of taste and the lowest score in the metaphor of sound. Monolingual children, on the other hand, had the lowest score in the tactile metaphor and the highest score in the metaphor of taste. It was concluded that while bilingual children received third-level score in the test of dual cards, monolingual children earned fourth-level score or full use.
