A Comparative Study of Conceptual Metaphors in English and Persian Newspapers

Abstract

Metaphors are not simply ornamental rhetorical devices that are used in poetry and literary texts; rather they are indispensable parts of our thinking. This paper seeks to analyze conceptual metaphors (CMs) cross-linguistically in three areas of economics, politics, and health studies in English and Persian newspapers within the framework of cognitive linguistics by means of Lakoff and Johnson‘s (1980) CM theory, to determine which language has the more pervasiveness of metaphors and also to find out the similarities and differences of CMs in three areas of newspaper. To this end, MIP (Metaphor Identification Procedure) and Kittay and Lehrer‘ (1981) semantic field theory of metaphor were used to properly locate and identify metaphors in the corpus of 1,525631 words. The results indicate that, despite the cultural differences and differently distributed source domains, the conceptual metaphors in the English and Persian newspapers are not so radically different and this is in line with Lakoff and Johnson‘s (1980) claim that the use of metaphor is consistent with the universal structure of human mental conceptualization. There are more CMs in Persian newspapers and in the area of economics. Out of ten source domains, the CMs of the journey, war, body, and nature were found to be some of the most frequently-used CMs in the corpus.

Keywords

• conceptual metaphor
• culture
• corpus study
• source domain
• newspaper