Metaphorical Language and Erving Goffman's Sociological Imagination

Social interaction is abstract concept and often have objective attribute and are used to demonstrate abstraction phenomenon. The use of metaphor in everyday life as the embodiment of social concepts in the Anglo-Saxon sociologists has been effective. Of course, factors such as the media, the film industry in America and phenomenological symbolic interaction approaches in mind Goffman has been effective. Goffman has been analyzed role and theater metaphors as a methodological phenomenon, the concept of the "self" in everyday life. This article aims to explain the sociological imagination Goffman according to Lakoff's the contemporary theory of metaphor. Research method is descriptive- analytical and data collection documental. Metaphors of "theater", "ritual", "Game" and "frame" were his most important and the most comprehensive instruments. Often Goffman's metaphors are location-based. Therefore, He has objectivized and visualized the social world as a field or stage. According to Lakoff's theory can be interpreted that Goffman has used theater metaphor as source domain for explain target domain. In Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor time is linked with location. Because concept of time is understood by move in the concept of place. He sometimes explain just a metaphor and at another time he describes the relationship between several metaphors.