MORALITY METAPHORS IN PERSIAN: A COGNITIVE AND CORPUS-DRIVEN APPROACH

Background and Aim: Lakoff and Johnson (۱۹۹۹) argue that one of the major findings of research in cognitive semantics, is that our moral cognition is largely metaphorical, growing out of a complex metaphoric system containing metaphorical mappings for conceptualizing, reasoning about, and communicating our moral ideas. This research studies the moral metaphor system in Persian with a corpus-driven approach for the first time. It represents part of my attempt to contribute a Persian perspective on moral imagination through metaphors. Methods: To achieve the goal, based on a balanced corpus of general Persian metaphors (Joulaei, ۱۳۹۱) some conceptual metaphors of moralities in Persian were identified in the form of sentences of natural language use. As the next step, several keywords were extracted out of these sentences to do a thorough search in a balanced corpus taken from the ۱۰۰ million words database of PLDB (Persian Linguistic DataBase) to find the other possible metaphors of morality in Persian. Finally, the conceptual metaphors and their source domains were classified and then quantified based on their frequencies in the corpus. Results: The present research attempts to find the prevalent conceptual metaphors of morality and their common source domains in Persian. Comparing the results with Lakoff and Johnson's work (۱۹۹۹) in English and Yu (۲۰۱۵) in Chinese I had a simple goal in mind, i.e., to see if the conceptual metaphors found in Persian are manifested in other languages and whether these metaphors are culture-specific, widespread, or universal. Finally, using a de-compositional approach I want to know whether these moral metaphors are primary or complex metaphors? Conclusion: The source domains for the conceptual metaphors included: uprightness, strength, and nurturance as well as a subsystem consisting of five pairs of moral and immoral metaphors whose source concepts represent contrastive categories in our visual experience: white and black, light and dark, clear and murky, clean and dirty, pure and impure. Besides, a de-compositional analysis shows that all of these metaphors are complex rather than primary while some of them are more central than the others and they are related to one another as a radial category. The results also showed that regardless of the differences in linguistic manifestation, Persian, English and, Chinese appear to exhibit a high degree of similarity in moral metaphors at the conceptual level. It can be explained based on our everyday embodied experience in the physical surroundings.

کلیدواژه ها:

Cognitive Linguistics ، Conceptual Metaphors ، Morality Metaphors ، Corpus Driven Approach