A Corpus-based Evaluation of Conceptual Metaphor Theoryâs Assumptions: The Case of

Golshaie, Ramin; Golfam, Arsalan; Golfam, Arsalan; Assi, Seyyed Mostafa; Aghagolzadeh, Ferdows

A Corpus-based Evaluation of Conceptual Metaphor Theoryâs Assumptions: The Case of " RGUMENT IS WAR" Metaphor in Persian

Authors

Ramin Golshaie ¹

Arsalan Golfam ²

Seyyed Mostafa Assi ³

Ferdows Aghagolzadeh ²

¹ Assistant Professor of Computer Linguistics, IRANDOC, Tehran, Iran

² Associate Professor, Department of General Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

³ Professor, Department of General Linguistics, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

We examined two assumptions of the "Conceptual Metaphor Theory" (CMT) using corpus-based method. According to the first assumption, linguistic metaphors are merely reflections of conceptual metaphors; so linguistic metaphors have a marginal and secondary role. According to the second assumption, conventional linguistic metaphors are systematic. A 50-milion token sample of Hamshahri collection of Persian texts was selected as the corpus of the study. All of the corpus analyses of calculating the collocations and extracting the concordances were carried out using Ant Conc corpus software. Data analysis failed to find evidence in support of the first assumption provided by CMT, but the second assumption was partially confirmed. The findings suggest that the semantic patterns of linguistic metaphors are more complex than those predicted by CMT, and language use factors play an undeniable role in shaping the semantics of metaphoric expressions.

Keywords

Conceptual metaphor Theory

Persian

corpus linguistics

Language use

collocation