Conceptualization of Body Part “Dam” in Metaphorical Idioms of Malekshahi Kurdish

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 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.

Keywords

• cognitive linguistics
• cognitive semantics
• metaphor
• body parts
• mapping
• southern kurdish
• malekshahi kurdish