دکتر کامیار جولایی

The current article is the first attempt to introduce and analyze synesthesia in Persian thoroughly. Synesthesia is a sensory and neurological phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense results in the stimulation of another or more other senses. This sensory phenomenon leaves traces in language as well. For instance, the following sentences are considered as linguistic synesthesia:Space was filled with a sharp odor (smell → touch)He took a cold look at me and left (vision → touch)Ullmann (1964) proposed a hierarchy of sense transfers in linguistic synesthesia. Sense transfer refers to what senses, as the primary senses, describe the other senses as the differentiated senses. According to Ullmann’s hierarchy of sense transfer in English, tactile and vision are situated at the two ends of this hierarchy in which tactile is the most basic sense and vision is the most differentiated sense. The following figure shows the sense transfer pattern in English:Touch → Taste → Smell → Vision → HearingThe current research employs Ullmannchr('39')s notion as its theoretical framework. It seeks to find answers to these questions: What is the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian’s balanced corpus? What are the most frequent source and target domains in Persian synesthetic metaphors? Comparing findings in Persian with findings in other languages, and how synesthetic classification can result in a cognitive typology in languages?This research has used obtained findings in similar research in languages other than Persian, such as English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, and German, to determine the universal principles governing the pattern of sense transfers in languages.

To answer the questions, the researchers searched the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) using some keywords related to the five senses to extract the most frequent source and target domains and determine whether Persian synesthetic metaphors follow Ullmann’s hierarchy of sense transfer or not. During this study, no experiments were performed on humans or animals. The research method is based on the ethical codes of the International Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE).

The corpus-based data revealed that the most frequent source domains for synesthetic metaphors in Persian were touch and taste, and the most frequent target domains were hearing, smell, and vision, respectively. In other words, senses of hearing, smell, and vision are mostly described by touch and taste in Persian. This figure can show the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian: Touch → Taste → Vision → Smell → Hearing 

 According to the corpus data, the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian is not entirely in line with Ullmann (1964) in that smell precedes vision. However, it conforms to a universal principle in that contact senses are used to describe distance senses. Touch and taste are considered contact senses, and smell, vision and hearing are considered distance senses. Hence, the Persian data do not contradict Ullmanchr('39')s hierarchy in this regard since smell and vision are considered distance senses. This overall principle also governs the sense transfer hierarchy in the other mentioned languages. The studied languages (English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, and German) use the contact senses, namely touch and taste, to describe and express the distance senses, namely sight, smell, and hearing. However, their parametric choice is which contact senses are used to describe the other senses more pervasively and which distance senses have been exposed to conceptualization more extensively.These findings can be explained in light of the embodiment theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Accordingly, the contact senses whose domain of the function is connected and close to the body were the most frequent source domains. This is in line with what Sweetzer (1990) argues about the orientation of conceptual mappings, which originate from the body to different conceptual domains.  This study’s result is significant because it allows for a cognitive typology of Persian compared to other languages under study.

Death is a vague, frightening and abstract concept, mostly considered as a taboo. The current study investigates the ways of conceptualizing death among Persian language speakers in a representative corpus of Persian texts. It seeks answer to the question: What kind of linguistic tools are used by Persian language speakers in order to conceptualize the phenomenon of death and what cultural elements are involved in this regard .To answer the research question, we used the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) and a selection of obituaries and epitaphs as data and attempted to identify and extract all the expressions which were directly or indirectly related to the concept of death. Using the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), by Lakoff and Johnson (1987), and cultural conceptualization by Sharifian (2011), the ways death is conceptualized were identified on the basis of a cognitive-cultural approach.

This article examines conceptual metaphors and tropes in the form of advertising broadcasted from national media (IRIB). The theoretical basis for this research is the conceptual metaphor of Lakoff and Johnson, as well as their views on conceptual trope in which metaphor and trope are considered not only as verbal phenomena but also as reflections of mental processes. Advertisement is one of the manifestations in which featured conceptual metaphors and tropes. Metaphors are powerful tool for advertising. In this research, 75 TV teaser advertisements were analyzed in five different groups. The results showed that conceptual metaphors and tropes play a very important role in television advertising, so that more than 97 percent of the advertisements surveyed contain one or both of these cases. It was also found that cultural elements play an important role in the figuration of conceptual metaphors and tropes, which in turn leads to shape subjective metaphors in the hidden layers of the mind of the Iranian society.

The present thesis 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 of 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 we tried to determine the proportion of these classes comparing with each other. We concluded that the Persian speakers make use of ontological metaphors in their daily language, more than the other classes. Then we tried to determine which conceptual mappings and source domains are the most common ones in each class. Due to the corpus driven approach in the analysis of metaphors, considerable results obtained. For example it was observed that the abstract concepts as life, emotions or time are understood via some concrete domains as, objects, containers and personification. In addition, ideas about adopting a corpus driven approach in analyzing the conceptual metaphors, and extending the sampled corpus findings to large corpora were discussed.