The Metaphorical Origin of the Polysemic Perceptive Verbs in Persian: A Cognitive Semantic Approach

Up to the emergence of cognitive linguistics, metaphor was considered to be a mechanism of poetic imagination, thus, a literary concept. As the cognitive model developed, the function of metaphors in everyday conversation was brought into focus by linguists. The question raised in this article is whether metaphor can be the source of polysemy in Persian perceptive verbs. Therefore a body of spoken and written data was collected from mass media, as well as from everyday talk. The research was conducted based on the hypothesis that “metaphor”, within the framework of cognitive semantics, is one of the reasons for polysemy. The hypothesis was confirmed through getting examined descriptively/inductively against the given data. It must be said that the general aim of the article was to show that semantic developments can be systematically explained in terms of the semantic frames.