elham sobati
Abstract
Given the importance of sight, which is one of the most important human senses regarding receiving environmental data, and its fundamental role in the recognition and processing of many behaviors, such as observing movements, events, and emotional states in individuals, as well as tracking and orientation, ...
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Given the importance of sight, which is one of the most important human senses regarding receiving environmental data, and its fundamental role in the recognition and processing of many behaviors, such as observing movements, events, and emotional states in individuals, as well as tracking and orientation, it should be expected that the performance of the blind in the process of language acquisition and learning cognitive skills was different in many aspects when compared to sighted individuals. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and compare the metaphorical concepts of love in the daily speech of Kurdish-Persian bilingual sighted and blind adults. To this end, research data was gathered using interviews with 50 bilingual Kurdish-Persian informants aged 18-70 from the Ilam province.Data analysis was done using descriptive and inferential statistics methods in SPSS software version 22. The results showed that, regarding the frequency of metaphors, there were no significant differences between the performance of the blind and the sighted adults. However, the frequency of the utilized sensory sources for the source domains of love was different in the speech of the two groups, where the blind used the sense of hearing significantly more than the sighted people to express love (P<0.05). Moreover, the subjects used certain source domains to express love which seemed to reflect cultural influences. In addition, the results of this study can lead to more interaction of blind subjects with society through solving their language problems. IntroductionOne of the important topics in the study of the emotional metaphor is to investigate the issue of what source domains are used by the speakers of the language in expressing their feelings. Kövecses (2002: 16-24) by extracting the most common source and target domains in the process of metaphorization, introduces 13 source domains as follows: human body, health and illness, animals, plants, buildings and construction, machines and tools, games and sport, money and economic transactions (business), cooking and food, heat and cold, light and darkness, forces, movement and direction.In the study of metaphorical concept of love, Kövecses (1986: 62) defines a central metaphor for love and states that it is a model for theconceptualization of love based on the fact that love is "the unification of two complementary parts". The common conceptual metaphors that Kövecses defines for love are: love is drink: I am thirsty for your love; Love is travel: It was a winding road; Love is unity: We are two souls in one body; we are inseparable; love is intimacy: they are very friendly; Love is bound: there is a closed circle between them (Kövecses, 2002: 27-26). Considering the importance of the subject's senses, especially the sense of sight in gaining experiences and the effect of its deficiency on the different representations of skills acquired in these subjects compared to sighted ones, knowing these differences provides valuable information about how neural structures interact in language skills. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate and compare the metaphorical concepts of love in the daily speech of Kurdish-Persian bilingual sighted and blind adults. In order to achieve this goal, we are trying to answer the question, what is the difference between the performance of Kurdish-Persian bilingual sighted and blind adults in understanding the conceptual metaphors of love?Literature ReviewThe study of the researches carried out in the field of conceptual metaphors of love showed that this concept has been investigated mostly in literary concepts and the examination of such metaphors in daily language is one of the main differences of this research with the other researches. A few of these studies will be mentioned subsequently.Ibrahimi et al. (2017) investigated the cognitive metaphors of love in Persian, English, and Turkish Proverbs. The results of their study showed that the mappings of love, disaster, pain, suffering, and diseasewere the most frequent mappings in the Persian language, and "love is light" was the most frequent mapping in both English and Turkish languages. The results of the research of Samimifar et al. (2022) showed that the mapping "love is sorrow" with a frequency of 123 and the mapping "love is a deception" with a frequency of 16 had the highest and lowest frequency in Khosrow and Shirin, respectively.Phuong, N. D., & Anh (2016) examined the cultural variations in conceptual metaphors of love in English and Vietnamese. 872 idioms showing social relationships have been gathered from a variety of sources such as novels, newspapers, magazines, daily interviews on radio, television, etc. Rendić (2022) did a thesis titled “A contrastive analysis of love metaphors in English and Croatian”. The findings of his study showed that although the informants of these two languages had different cultures and environments, they both used the conceptual metaphors of "love is journey" and "love is war" in these two languages. But this cultural and environmental difference made them use different tools for the same conceptual metaphors.MethodologyTo measure how the conceptual metaphors of love are processed, a qualitative method was used, so that the research data in this section was collected using interviews and data was extracted through recording the speech of blind subjects and the sighted group as a control group. In this study, vision status was considered as an independent variable, and mapping as a dependent variable. The statistical population of this study included all blind Kurdish-Persian bilingual subjects and their sighted counterparts who live in Ilam City and its surrounding cities. Among these subjects, a total of 50 adults in the agerange of 18-70 years were considered for this study, out of which 25 congenitally blind subjects were selected as the experimental group and 25 sighted peers were selected as the control group. By studying the medical files of blind subjects, those who met the conditions (adults who are illiterate to bachelor's degree, Kurdish-Persian bilingual living in Ilam province, in the age range of 18-70 years, with normal vision in the case of sighted subjects, congenital blind subjects, having average IQ, right-handedness, belonging to the middle social class) were selected. Sighted adults, who were the counterparts of blind adults, were selected from normal subjects.In this study, two methods of descriptive and inferential statistics have been used to analyze the data. In descriptive statistics, information concerning the frequency and percentage of metaphorical expressions is provided. Also, a significant inferential analysis of the frequency comparison was performed using the chi-square test. All statistical analyses were performed in SPSS version 22 software.ConclusionThe data analysis of this test showed that the subjects metaphorized the feeling of love using 271 metaphorical expressions in the form of 53 mappings. In the meantime, in the metaphorization of this feeling in the speech of the sighted subjects, 112 metaphorical expressions were raised through 25 mappings. On the other hand, the blind subjects expressed the feeling of love using 159 metaphorical expressions in the form of 28 mappings. The general comparison of the subjects' performance in the test of understanding the conceptual metaphors of love indicated that although the number of mappings used in the speech of the two groups of sightedand blind adults was largely similar, the sensory sources used for the origin of love were different. To be more precise, the blind subjects used the sense of hearing statistically significant more than the sighted subjects to express love. Also, in some cases, subjects used specific source domains to express love, which seemed to be a reflection of cultural influences.
