Exploring Cognitive Conceptualization of Love in Simin Daneshvar's Novels

Abstract

In the present research, based on the Kövecses (1986, 2010) cognitive conceptualization theory of emotions, conceptualization of love in Simin Daneshvar's novels has been studied. For doing so, first the conceptual metaphors of love were extracted from the data by combining two methods of metaphor determination: 1. Machine search of the lexical item(s) of a specific target domain (the word love in our case) by a concordancer program (AntConc (Anthony, 2014), in our case) and 2. Manual search of the whole data. Then, the manual search of the whole data was carried out to find the conceptual metonymies and related concepts of love. In the next step, different types of metaphor, metonymy and also related concepts of love were studied. In the final step, on the basis of the conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies and related concepts of love, the cognitive model of love in Daneshvar's novels was identified. The cognitive model of love has shaped based on 40 conceptual metaphors, 33 conceptual metonymies with the general metonymic pattern of “EMOTION EFFECT FOR EMOTION” and also 11 related concepts of love, some of which are the causes and the rest are the effects of love.

Keywords

• love
• conceptual metaphor
• conceptual metonymy
• related concepts
• cognitive model