Women's Studies
Emilia Nersessians; Ebrahim Fayaz; Leila Ardebili
Abstract
Recent studies in the field of cognitive science on conceptual metaphor indicated that metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon but it is essentially a conceptual-experimental process that constructs our mental world and is a means that reflects the origin of the cognitive structures of human thought. ...
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Recent studies in the field of cognitive science on conceptual metaphor indicated that metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon but it is essentially a conceptual-experimental process that constructs our mental world and is a means that reflects the origin of the cognitive structures of human thought. By examining the metaphorical conceptualization of marriage and childbearing widely used in Persian everyday language, the present study seeks to demonstrate how the study of conceptual metaphors, within the framework of sociolinguistics, can help us get a better understanding of collective representations and cultural cognition. To achieve this goal, the present study is to utilize ethnographic strategy and semi-structured interview from twenty married women between the ages of 50-70 in Tehran, has gained some common metaphors in the conceptualization of marriage and childbearing. Subsequently, based on the premises of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, these metaphors are analyzed qualitatively. The results show that such conceptual mappings bear theoretical significance for the study of metaphor in identifying collective representation and cultural cognition and help us to get a deeper understanding of cultural understanding of the concepts in a community.