The Mental Coding Process of Idioms in Persian & English; Cognitive Semantics Framework

Understanding the way that abstract information has been expressed in the different languages is one of the attractive subjects in cognitive linguistics. In this regard, Idioms as a part of cultural and national identity of speakers can play an important role in understanding concepts and linguistic materials. So in the present study we have tried to examine the representations of image schemas in two languages; Persian and English, within the framework of cognitive semantics and based on Johnson's Schematic Model (1987). Therefore, we selected the data from the “Common Persian Idioms and Phrases: Persian-English” which was provided by Bateni (2013) and have studied them in a descriptive-analytical way. This paper explores the conceptual image schemas of idioms in Persian and then compares them with their English equivalent. The results show that the mental coding process of idioms in these two languages can be divided in 6 ways and in most cases this process was similar between these languages. Moreover, English has the most schematic similarity between their information and messages. The pass and force schema are the most common in English and Persian, respectively. Due to the conceptual schemas are dynamic patterns in cognitive semantics which are not studied thoroughly the idioms of these Languages in past; so the importance and the objective of this study was the analysis of this phenomenon in the context of conceptual schema and also explain the relationship between the speakers language and mind.