Analysis of Ontological Metaphors in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh through an Approach of Cognitive Linguistics

Metaphor is one of the major issues in cognitive linguistics. Metaphor, in this approach, is not just one of the tools of poetic imagination or a lingual feature, but it occurs in our everyday life and our thoughts and actions. It is essentially a way through which the conceptualization of a domain of experience is going to be expressed in other domain, according to Lakoff and Johnson (2003). The destination domain is usually more abstract and the source domain is more objective and tangible. The above mentioned scholars have divided conceptual metaphors into three ontological, structural, and directional groups. Through a descriptive-analytic method, the present study is to analyze the materialistic ontological metaphors in Ferdowsi's masterpiece, Shahnameh. The phenomenal or material metaphors are those that are formed on the basis of human experience of material and physical objects. In order to answer the question of how material ontological metaphors were used in Shahnameh and what concepts have become concrete through this metaphor, the authors have reviewed about 3800 distiches of the work. It has been found that Ferdowsi made many abstract concepts tangible by using material objects. These concepts are destination domains that have been conceptualized with the source domain of object. Ontological metaphors are the most frequent type of conceptual metaphors in Shahnameh.