Conceptual Blending of War, Hunting and Love in Saadi's Ghazals Based on Fauconnier and Turner

The aim of this research is to explain the conceptual blending of war and hunting, and to analyze the specific dimentions of this blending in Saadi’s Ghazals based on Fauconnier and Turner. One of the frequent cognitive concepts in Saadi’s Ghazals is war and hunting as the input domain of love. The theory of conceptual blending is an effective instrument for understanding the interaction between a conceptual system with its domains. Fauconnier and Turner introduced the theory of multispace or network model. In the network model, the common concepts of two input domains create a generic space. Moreover, the interaction between these two input domains creates a blended space in which the conceptual structure can not be percieved only from the input spaces. In this research we will show that most concepts of love are related to the beloved and specific terms used to describe him/her. In the blended domain, there are some paradoxical concepts like considering death as eternal life, or captivity as freedom. After demonstrating the dimentions of conceptual blending of war and hunting , we will try to find out how the resulted paradox in the blended domain is created. The hypothesis is that this paradox is resulted from the effects of mystical concepts of love in Sufi discourse on the poet’s mental models, even if the Ghazal is categorized as a love one.