Cognitive content-analysis of function metaphors in elementary school Farsi textbooks

This paper is the result of a research with the aim of studying function metaphors in Farsi elementary school textbooks based on cognitive linguistics. The method of this research has been descriptive and qualitative content analysis. The importance of this study was due to the fact that metaphor is considered as one of the abstract concepts of thought and language. Language, as an important tool, can help child's intellectual development more than anything else; so scientific and reasonable method should be provided to teach it. In this study in order to achieve this goal, one of the latest views on the metaphor in cognitive linguistics framework was introduced. This study is geared toward studying the functional metaphors in all six grades Farsi textbooks at the elementary school level. The result showed that all functional metaphors (ontological, structural and orientational) are used in Farsi textbooks of the 2nd to 6th grades and in the 1st grade, only the ontological metaphor is used. Moreover, the ontological metaphor with the 97.4% frequency has the greatest use among the other kinds of functional metaphors. The great use of container metaphor (%51.3) among the other kinds of ontological metaphors (personification, object and substance) is another result of this study. The findings of this study could motivate the use of ontological metaphor in the early stages of education when the students have little information about concepts. Then, little by little, with increase in their cognitive development, the usage of this metaphor would be decreased. Moreover, because “personification” is considered as a tenant of child thought, suitable usage of it, especially in the younger age group, helps students to understand intangible, immaterial, vague and abstract concepts more easily.