Abstract

Metaphor becomes the subject of interest for many researchers in recent decades. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the universality of emotion metaphorical conceptualization and the dominant pattern in English and Persian based on Kovecses’s (2003) model for Linguistic expression of Metaphor. The emotions under study were happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and love. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory was adopted as a model for the purpose of comparison.
To do so, 782 emotive metaphorical expressions were compiled from different literary works and related articles on the field and Dictionaries in both languages. The study was conducted through two main phases of categorization and comparison. First expressions were categorized under their general and specific target and source domains. At the second phase, in each category, metaphorical expressions were compared with based on their conceptual metaphor and literal meaning. At this phase, three patterns of totally the same, partially the same, and totally different were identified.
Also the results of Chi-Square applied to these three patterns demonstrate that anger ( = 108.85, P<0/000) was the most universal emotion, whereas sadness ( = 31.40, P< 0/000) was the least universal emotion during this study. In addition, the dominant pattern at the end of analysis was the pattern of totally the same.

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