A contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors in animal-related proverbs in Persian and Mazandarani from a cognitive-cultural perspective

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities Science, Yasouj University, Yasouj, Iran

2 Assistant Professor of English Language, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities Science, Yasouj University, Yasouj, Iran

3 Head of English Language Department, Ayandegan Institute of Higher Education, Tonekabon, Iran.

Abstract

By contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors in animal proverbs in Persian and Mazandarani, the present research seeks to explore the influence of culture upon animal proverbs in the two languages, and to indicate how context might lead to variation in metaphors and derived proverbs. To this end, 156 Persian and 264 Mazandarani proverbs were collected, and metaphorical analysis was limited to the most frequent domestic and wild animals as well as animals unique to Mazandarani proverbs. The analysis of proverbs from a cognitive-cultural perspective reveals that the diversity in the proverbs of the two languages sometimes stems from differences in the source domain of the ontological metaphor underlying the proverbs. That is, different source domains are used in the two languages to conceptualize the same abstract feature in the target domain. In other cases, the diversity results from the mapping of a single source domain to a range of different target domains in the two languages. A comparison of the frequency of animal names in the proverbs also indicates that most animal names appear with different frequencies in the two languages.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Persian Language and Iranian Dialects

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 20 April 2024

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