Metaphorical Model of time in Persian: A corpus-based study

The concept of ‘time’ is one of the most important and fundamental concepts in human mind and life, which according to the findings of cognitive linguists, is mainly understood and expressed metaphorically in different languages and cultures. The present paper examines the conceptual metaphors of time in Persian and its purpose is to provide a systematic model of the types of conceptual metaphors that Persian speakers use to understand and express the concept of ‘time’. The study is based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993) and the theory of image schemas (Johnson, 1987) and its data are mainly extracted from the Hamshahri Corpus (second version) supplemented with data from Internet Google search. The results show that in Persian, the concept of ‘time’ is understood and expressed based on three image schemas of ‘movement’, ‘container’ and ‘object’, and through the conceptual metaphors ‘time is space’, ‘time is an (moving or stationary) object’, ‘time is human’, and ‘time is a container’.