Conceptual Metaphor of Love and Meaning Clusters associated with it in Attar’s Tazkara al-Alawiya

Before the advent of cognitive linguistics, metaphor was considered as an approach to embellish texts, and a method for artistic innovations. However, when the conceptual metaphor theory was put forward, instrumental metaphor was used for thinking and thought which are pervasive in everyday life and conceptualize many of abstract concepts. Emotion-related metaphors especially love metaphor, are frequently used in literary texts. The present article studies the conceptual metaphor of love and related semantic clusters in Tazkirat al-Awliyā by Attar. Theoretical bases of this article include linguistics and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory about metaphor, criterion for classification of conceptual metaphor of love, and Afrashi and Hesami’s classification (1392). Descriptive analysis of all types of metaphors and extraction of related mappings showed that, to conceptualize love, Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliyā took advantage of tangible domains of place, objective concepts, living beings and some mental concepts as the source domain. Statistical analysis of conceptual metaphor of love shows that, out of the 166 metaphors found, object-based metaphors and structure-based metaphors had the highest frequencies respectively. These two types of metaphors, in sum, comprise 43.45 percent of all metaphors used in this area. In terms of usage, orientational metaphor ranked third and living beings metaphor and mental metaphor were placed in the following ranks. On the other hand, visual metaphor (1 case) and emotion-based metaphor (2 cases) had the minimum number of usage in Tazkirat al-Awliyā, respectively. Furthermore, objective metaphor wasn’t used in the concept under study.