The Study of “prototypical Model of Love” in Leyli and Majnoon “Based on Kovecses’s Model of Love”

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ‘prototypical model of love’ in the poetry story of ‘Lily and Majnoon’ by Nezami. To do so, the conceptual metaphors of love (Majnoon’s love for Leyli) were extracted from the corpus, categorized according to the source domains and then compared with the model of love proposed by Kövecses (1986/1988). The purpose was to see to what extent the model and the corpus are in line with each other. The results of data analysis showed that all the source domains of the prototypical model of love were also found in the corpus under study. This implies that there is a significant conformity between them. The concepts of fire, beauty, insanity, plant and bondage were found to be the most frequent source domains used in the corpus. Among three types of love metaphors, ontological metaphors and metaphors of unity were the most and the least frequent metaphors respectively. Also, the concept of ‘beauty’ and ‘fire’ were mostly used domains. The concept of ‘bondage’, with positive and pleasant implication, was the only source domain belonging to the typical model of love. There have also been cases where the conceptualization of love in the corpus was different from the theoretical model, including the use of the ‘plant’ as the source domain in mapping with the concept of love.