Analyzing the use of metaphorical structures that imply the concept of "surprise" in Nahj al-Balagha: based on Likoff and Johnson's theory

Cognitive linguistics is one of the new trends in linguistics that has created effective tools and methods for analyzing different texts. Conceptual metaphor is one of the important theories in this science, according to this theory, "metaphor" is not just a literary arrangement to embellish words, but it refers to the conceptualization of one semantic domain in the form of another semantic domain, and based on this, in explaining abstract concepts, especially It plays a significant role in the field of religious texts. Therefore, the present study tries to extract those metaphorical expressions that contain the concept of "surprise" from the sermons of Nahj al-Balagha and analyze them based on the theory of cognitive metaphor by adopting a qualitative approach and a descriptive-analytical method. The preliminary investigations show that Imam Ali (a.s.) conceptualizes those abstract concepts on the basis of concrete sources of origin, which caused him astonishment, and used different schemas to explain the destination field.