The Investigation of Orientational Metaphors in "Dreams from my Father

Metaphor is traditionally defined as a figure of speech that makes a comparison, for rhetorical effect, between two things that are fundamentally dissimilar. Today, metaphor receives scholarly attention in various fields of sciences including cognitive sciences and prominently cognitive linguistics. Johnson and Lakoff, two distinguished figures in the very field, claim that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. They introduced such iconoclastic foundation of idea in1980 with the publication of their book Metaphors We Live by. The present article focuses upon Obama's metaphorical language in his novel "Dreams from my Father" with regard to Jonson's and Lakoff metaphor theory. The research method is descriptive-analytical based on which the oriental metaphors are extracted from the novel and are studied for analysis. The results suggest that though the oriental metaphors tallying Johnson's and Lakoff metaphor theory is large in number, there still are other metaphors with apparently oriental quality that do not correspond to contemporary theory of metaphor. Hence, a new path for scholars in the field.