The Study of Cultural Conceptualization of Marriage and Childbearing among women in Tehran: with a cognitive sociolinguistics approach

Recent studies in the field of cognitive science on conceptual metaphor have shown that metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon but is essentially a conceptual-experimental process that constructs our mental world and is a means that reflects the origin of the cognitive structures of human thought. By examining the metaphorical conceptualization of marriage and childbearing that are widely used in Persian everyday language, the present study seeks to demonstrate how the study of conceptual metaphors, within the framework of sociolinguistics, can help us in a better understanding of collective representations and cultural cognition. To achieve this goal, the present study utilizes ethnographic strategy and semi-structured interview from twenty married women with the child has gained some common metaphors in the conceptualization of marriage and childbearing. Subsequently, based on the premises of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, these metaphors are analyzed qualitatively. The results show that such conceptual mappings bear theoretical significance for the study of metaphor in identifying collective representation and cultural cognition and help us to get a deeper understanding of cultural understanding of concepts in a community.