The Role of Ecology in the Conceptualization of Martyrdom in Salman Harati’s Poems: the Crossroad of Cognitive View and Eco criticism

Cognitive Linguistics Studies have found that conceptual metaphor is an active process of cognitive system which has an influential role in the construction and organization of cultural network in mind, language, and behavior of humans, so that many categorizations and understandings are based on this mechanism. Moreover, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, introduced by Lakoff and Johnson, (1980) claims that there is a significant correlation between biological and environmental experiences of humans and their metaphorical conceptualizations, which can be represented in the language including the language of poetry and literary discourse. Literary discourse and poetry have the same linguistic rules. In this view, there is a relationship between the basis of conceptual metaphors and literature, since in a specific language there are mappings between target and source domains which are invoked by experiential correlations, perceived structural similarities and the existence of source domain in their literature. On the other hand, Eco criticism focuses on the relation of human and nature and their reflection in literature. In this approach, what is emphasized on is the reflection of the relationship between humans and their environment in literature. The crossroad of these two semantic and literary approaches can be a framework in which we can study the cognitive link between the poet and his ecology and its manifestation in his work. The language of poetry is influenced by ecological experiences of its poet. Until now, no study has been performed to analyze the relationship between nature, poet and language of poetry from this eclectic approach. Therefore, this paper tries to study the influence of environmental experiences of Salman Harati, who is a famous Persian contemporary poet, on the social-religious conceptualizations reflected in his poetry. In his poems, an obvious relationship between ecological elements and concepts and the poets conceptualizations is reflected. The emergence of political and social beliefs and interpretations in Harati's poetry is the most outstanding property of his poetic language which is portrayed with the help of the concepts existing in the nature of the north of Iran. This research has used an eclectic method of both Conceptual Metaphor Theory-specially the principles on the basis of metaphor- and Eco criticism. It has used the cognitive mechanism of conceptual metaphor to explain the effects of experiential concepts of nature and the poet's direct observations of it on his poetic conceptualizations. The metaphors have been limited to those with the target domain of Martyrdom and Imamah because the essence of Harati's poetry is religion. The authors seek to answer the following questions: 1.how the natural environment has affected these metaphors? And 2.Which environmental and natural concepts have been used as the source domains for the conceptualization of social and cultural concepts- Martyrdom and Imamah?-. From another perspective, 3. What role or roles the ecology or nature has/have in the meaning construction in literature. To do so, the metaphors involving the target domains of Martyrdom and Imamah have been extracted. Then, on the basis of Cognitive Metaphor Theory, the role of the poet's natural environment as well as its components on his poetic conceptualizations have been explained. The results of this study showed that ‘Salman ecological and cultural experience have great influences on forming his poetic discourse and on the interaction between emotional and cognitive spaces in his poetry. Harati has used three target domains of nature including light, plant and, water and their relevant concepts to highlight some aspects of martyrdom and Imamah. There is a metaphor martyrdom / martyr and Imamah/ Imam is nature underlying all of these conceptualizations. Knowledge, monotheism, love, resistance, waiting and other meaning components relevant to martyrdom and Imamah culture are highlighted through these ecological metaphors.