Cognitive Linguistic Approach to "Sadness and Happiness" Metaphors in the Persian Translation of Nahj al-Balaghah

The contemporary metaphor theory is based on the belief that the system of human understanding and perception is based on metaphor, which is entirely involuntarily mixed with human daily life. In this approach, it is considered a part of human life. So, metaphors are not only a pure linguistic function but also an essential tool for understanding abstract and intangible things in the human mind, and their scope of work and influence is not at the level of words but in the depth of meaning and concepts. Since part of the language structure of religious texts, such as Nahj al-Balaghah, contains metaphors, and the metaphors of this religious text are far beyond linguistic and literary metaphors, this research aims to find abstract metaphors of "sadness and "happiness". In the present study, by reading, searching, and examining the translated text of Nahj al-Balaghah, some sadness and happiness words and their synonyms were found, and some contained conceptual metaphors. Therefore, the words containing the conceptual metaphor of sadness and happiness were chosen and explained according to the theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). As a result, metaphorical mappings were obtained, such as sadness is substance, sadness is a living thing, sadness is fire, sadness is a fluid, sadness is destructive, sadness is dust, sadness is clothes, and the mappings of happiness is the object, happiness is a living being.