A Study of Metaphors in the Speech of Persian Language Students Based on a Cognitive Approach

Abstract

Metaphor is the most important linguistic phenomenon which has been noted by the scientists, philosophers, writers and recent linguists. The purpose of this research is to study the metaphors in the speaking of Persian language students in Islamic Azad University of Ahvaz. To do so, the author has randomly selected fifty Persian speaker students and recorded thirty hours of their speech, presented in three different linguistic contexts. Writing out the linguistic data, 1,000 sentences were collected. Then, the data was analyzed on the base of the theoretical research and 122 metaphorical expressions were extracted. It was found that a significant part of the student's speech is metaphorical, and a variety of conceptual metaphors were seen. The structural metaphor had the highest frequency of occurrence and the orientational metaphor had the lowest frequency. Besides, whenever the linguistic context was formal, using the metaphor in language was less and whenever the linguistic context was informal, using metaphor in language was more. Accordingly, the metaphorical structures were higher in the third linguistic context while they were lower in the second linguistic context.