Facta Universitatis Series: Linguistics and Literature (Dec 2008)

CHESS-RELATED METAPHORS - GENS UNA SUMUS

  • Biljana Mišić Ilić

Abstract

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The paper examines chess-related metaphorical expressions in English and Serbian from the cognitive linguistic perspective. These linguistic expressions stem from conceptual mapping from the source domain (chess) to the target domain (life in general, or, more precisely, complex life situations). The paper tries to establish atopology of such mappings, based on the notions of event structure and inheritance hierarchies. From the contrastive point of view, the findings show a high correlation regarding this kind of metaphoric conceptualization between the two languages, which may suggest a considerable level of universality, at least in cultures familiar with the game of chess.

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