Orientational Conceptual Metaphors in Persian: A Cognitive Perspective and a Corpus Driven Analysis

The present article studies conceptual metaphors in a representative corpus of Persian texts. Exploiting the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB), we sampled a corpus of contemporary written texts, based on their similarity to the colloquial language of the Persian speakers, and then tried to identify and extract the relevant conceptual metaphors. The sample corpus contains 10 texts of contemporary Iranian writers, naming Hedayat, Jamalzadeh, Daneshvar, Aale –Ahmad, et al. Analyzing the corpus, the writer managed to extract nearly 2000 conceptual metaphors in the form of 600 name of the mappings. Then the conceptual metaphors classified according to the Lakoff and Johnson classification (1980) as ontological, structural and orientational, and a class of conceptual metaphors that Lakoff and Turner (1989) presented as image metaphors. As the next step I tried to determine the proportion of these classes comparing with each other. I concluded that the Persian speakers make use of ontological metaphors in their daily speech, more than other classes. Then I tried to determine which conceptual mappings and source domains are the most common ones in the class of orientational metaphors. Due to the corpus driven approach in the analysis of metaphors, considerable results obtained. For example it was observed that abstract concepts such as quantification, confrontation or control are understood via some spatial domains such as up & down, front & back and below & above. In addition, some ideas in the conceptual metaphor theory were criticized.