Happiness conceptual metaphors in Persian: A cognitive corpus-driven approach

زبانشناسی و گویش های خراسان

Article 3, Volume 5, Issue 9, July 2013, Pages 49-72   

Document Type: علمی - پژ‍وهشی

DOI: 10.22067/lj.v5i9.37337

Authors

Mahdis Zoorvarz^* ; Azita Afrashi; S. Mostafa Assi

Abstract

This study investigates the conceptual metaphors of happiness in a representative corpus of Modern Persian. Making use of Persian Linguistic Database, we sampled a corpus of contemporary written texts, to represent modern colloquial Persian; then we tried to extract the relevant conceptual metaphors of happiness. The sample corpus contains 14 texts written by contemporary Iranian writers. Analyzing the corpus, we managed to extract 297 conceptual metaphors of happiness within 33 mappings. Then the most frequent conceptual mappings and source domains were determined. Due to the corpus driven approach in this research noticeable results were obtained. We tried to suggest the common source domains and name of the mappings for happiness metaphors. In this regard, source domains such as: “object”, “substance” and “action” are the most frequent. As an important finding of the present research, we could present embodied places of happiness. Moreover, we provided a comparison between the conceptual metaphors of happiness in Persian and English.

Keywords

cognitive semantics; conceptual metaphor; Emotions; corpus-driven analysis; Happiness; pleasure