Kamyar Joulaei
Kamyar Joulaei holds Ph.D. in linguistics at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies (IHCS). He was formerly employed by the international relations office of IHCS and the faculty of Encyclopedia Studies at IHCS. He is a translator who has translated more than 30 books in the fields of psychology and literature from English to Persian.
In his dissertation, he has investigated the cognitive phenomenon of synesthesia based on a large corpus of Persian texts. Then in a cross-linguistic approach, he compared the findings in Persian with the researches in other languages from different families such as English, German, Italian, Chinese, and Hebrew. The outcomes resulted in the Semantic typology of Persian.
The field of cognitive semantics has been his major field of interest in linguistics since he was an M.A student. His M.A thesis was also in this field titled “conceptual metaphors in Persian; a cognitive and a corpus-driven approach” in which he studied the conceptual metaphors in a thorough corpus of Persian texts utilizing computational and statistical methods for the first time in Persian. His interest in cognitive semantics also led him to a cross-linguistic group research with his colleagues at IHCS in which they studied the conceptual metaphors of motion in Persian comparing it with English with the article titled “Conceptual Metaphors of Motion in Persian: A Corpus- Driven Analysis” as the outcome. In this article, they studied the metaphorical motion in a sampled corpus of Persian texts.
He worked as the scientific relations expert for the faculty of encyclopedia research. He has also worked on the project of Persian FrameNet in which he and his colleagues tagged a corpus of 10000 Persian sentences based on the Frame Semantics Theory.
Iranian languages and dialects is another major interest of him. He works on the languages and dialects of the Semnan province of Iran, Specially the endangered ones. He has also done research on other languages, such as Kurdish, Azeri, Armenian, and the dialects of Qazvin.
Kamyar Joulaei has been selected as the top researcher at IHCS for two sequential years (2018, 2019). He has attended several workshops, the most important of which was the Berlin Fall School in Documentary Linguistics (2018) held by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program (ELDP).
He has served as a university lecturer in linguistics and English Translation at Azad University of Tehran.
Supervisors: Prof. Azita Afrashi, Prof. Ahmad Pakatchi, Prof. S.Mostafa Assi
In his dissertation, he has investigated the cognitive phenomenon of synesthesia based on a large corpus of Persian texts. Then in a cross-linguistic approach, he compared the findings in Persian with the researches in other languages from different families such as English, German, Italian, Chinese, and Hebrew. The outcomes resulted in the Semantic typology of Persian.
The field of cognitive semantics has been his major field of interest in linguistics since he was an M.A student. His M.A thesis was also in this field titled “conceptual metaphors in Persian; a cognitive and a corpus-driven approach” in which he studied the conceptual metaphors in a thorough corpus of Persian texts utilizing computational and statistical methods for the first time in Persian. His interest in cognitive semantics also led him to a cross-linguistic group research with his colleagues at IHCS in which they studied the conceptual metaphors of motion in Persian comparing it with English with the article titled “Conceptual Metaphors of Motion in Persian: A Corpus- Driven Analysis” as the outcome. In this article, they studied the metaphorical motion in a sampled corpus of Persian texts.
He worked as the scientific relations expert for the faculty of encyclopedia research. He has also worked on the project of Persian FrameNet in which he and his colleagues tagged a corpus of 10000 Persian sentences based on the Frame Semantics Theory.
Iranian languages and dialects is another major interest of him. He works on the languages and dialects of the Semnan province of Iran, Specially the endangered ones. He has also done research on other languages, such as Kurdish, Azeri, Armenian, and the dialects of Qazvin.
Kamyar Joulaei has been selected as the top researcher at IHCS for two sequential years (2018, 2019). He has attended several workshops, the most important of which was the Berlin Fall School in Documentary Linguistics (2018) held by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program (ELDP).
He has served as a university lecturer in linguistics and English Translation at Azad University of Tehran.
Supervisors: Prof. Azita Afrashi, Prof. Ahmad Pakatchi, Prof. S.Mostafa Assi
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During the introduction and critique of this book, the author of this article tries to provide readers with some important concepts of cognitive linguistics and introduce new approaches to this field of study. This book is organized into 8 chapters, each of which describes one of the major topics in this field. These chapters are as follows: 1- Introduction 2- Categorization and cognition; 3- Image schemas; 4- Conceptual metaphor 5- Conceptual metonymy 6- Conceptualizing time, place, and movement; 7- Polysemy 8- Conceptual blending.
چکیده
نزدیک به سه دهه از شکلگیری زبانشناسی شناختی در جهان و کمتر از یک دهه در ایران میگذرد. با این حال این شاخه از زبانشناسی در ایران علم نوپایی محسوب میشود و حجم کتابهایی که در بازه زمانی عنوان شده در این زمینه به زبان فارسی انتشار یافتهاند انگشت شمارند. کتاب مبانی معناشناسی شناختی با تکیه بر دادههایی از زبان و فرهنگ فارسی و با نگاهی به یافتههای سایر علوم، به هدف معرفی و تببین مبانی این علم میانرشتهای نزد علاقهمندان این حوزه بهطور عام و دانشجویان این شاخه از زبانشناسی، نگاشته شده است. نوشته حاضر تلاش دارد تا ضمن معرفی و ارزیابی این اثر، به معرفی برخی مفاهیم مطرح در این زمینه بپردازد و خوانندگان را با جدیدترین دستاوردهای این حوزه آشنا سازد. نقد حاضر از 8 بخش تشکیل شده است که هر بخش به معرفی یکی از فصول کتاب میپردازد و در پایان جمعبندی کلی از مطالب بیان شده است.
کلیدواژهها: نقد کتاب، کتاب مبانی معناشناسی شناختی، زبانشناسی شناختی، معناشناسی شناختی.
Introduction: The current article is the first attempt to introduce and analyze synesthesia in Persian thoroughly. Synesthesia is a sensory and neurological phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense results in the stimulation of another or more other senses. This sensory phenomenon leaves traces in language as well. For instance, the following sentences are considered as linguistic synesthesia:
Space was filled with a sharp odor (smell → touch)
He took a cold look at me and left (vision → touch)
Ullmann (1964) proposed a hierarchy of sense transfers in linguistic synesthesia. Sense transfer refers to what senses, as the primary senses, describe the other senses as the differentiated senses. According to Ullmann’s hierarchy of sense transfer in English, tactile and vision are situated at the two ends of this hierarchy in which tactile is the most basic sense and vision is the most differentiated sense. The following figure shows the sense transfer pattern in English:
Touch → Taste → Smell → Vision → Hearing
The current research employs Ullmann's ('39')s notion as its theoretical framework. It seeks to find answers to these questions: What is the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian’s balanced corpus? What are the most frequent source and target domains in Persian synesthetic metaphors? Comparing findings in Persian with findings in other languages, and how synesthetic classification can result in a cognitive typology in languages?
This research has used obtained findings in similar research in languages other than Persian, such as English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, and German, to determine the universal principles governing the pattern of sense transfers in languages.
Methods: To answer the questions, the researchers searched the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) using some keywords related to the five senses to extract the most frequent source and target domains and determine whether Persian synesthetic metaphors follow Ullmann’s hierarchy of sense transfer or not. During this study, no experiments were performed on humans or animals. The research method is based on the ethical codes of the International Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE).
Results: The corpus-based data revealed that the most frequent source domains for synesthetic metaphors in Persian were touch and taste, and the most frequent target domains were hearing, smell, and vision, respectively. In other words, senses of hearing, smell, and vision are mostly described by touch and taste in Persian. This figure can show the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian: Touch → Taste → Vision → Smell → Hearing
Conclusion: According to the corpus data, the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian is not entirely in line with Ullmann (1964) in that smell precedes vision. However, it conforms to a universal principle in that contact senses are used to describe distance senses. Touch and taste are considered contact senses, and smell, vision, and hearing are considered distance senses. Hence, the Persian data do not contradict Ullmann('39')s hierarchy in this regard since smell and vision are considered distance senses. This overall principle also governs the sense transfer hierarchy in the other mentioned languages. The studied languages (English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, and German) use the contact senses, namely touch and taste, to describe and express the distance senses, namely sight, smell, and hearing. However, their parametric choice is which contact senses are used to describe the other senses more pervasively and which distance senses have been exposed to conceptualization more extensively.
These findings can be explained in light of the embodiment theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Accordingly, the contact senses whose domain of the function is connected and close to the body were the most frequent source domains. This is in line with what Sweetzer (1990) argues about the orientation of conceptual mappings, which originate from the body to different conceptual domains. This study’s result is significant because it allows for a cognitive typology of Persian compared to other languages under study.
Keywords: Synesthesia, Cognitive semantics, Conceptual metaphor, Cognitive typology, Corpus-based approach.
مقدمه: حسآمیزی پدیدهای ادراکی و عصب¬شناختی است که بر اساس آن، تحریک یکی از حواس موجب تحریک یک یا چند حس دیگر میشود. Ullmann (1964) برای نخستین بار سلسله¬مراتبی را برای انتقال حواس در حسآمیزی زبانی معرفی کرد. پژوهشگران مقاله حاضر اندیشه Ullmann را به عنوان چارچوب نظری انتخاب کردند تا دریابند در پیکرهای متوازن از زبان فارسی، کدامیک از حواس در بیشترین تعامل با یکدیگر هستند و نیز سلسله¬مراتب انتقال حواس در زبان فارسی چگونه است؟
روش کار: به این منظور، ابتدا پیکرهای متوازن از زبان فارسی با بهرهگیری از پایگاه دادههای زبان فارسی تنظیم شد، سپس با استفاده از کلید واژههای مربوط به حواس پنج¬گانه و حوزههای مرتبط، جملات دربردارنده موارد حسآمیزی استخراج و الگوی انتقال حواس در زبان فارسی مشخص شد.
یافتهها: دادههای برگرفته از پیکره نشان دادند که در زبان فارسی، حواسی که با بالاترین بسامد در جایگاه حوزه مبدأ و مقصد درنگاشتهای حسآمیخته واقع میشوند به ترتیب عبارتند از حس لامسه و شنوایی. همچنین سلسله مراتب انتقال حواس در زبان فارسی تفاوتهایی را با الگوی پیشنهاد شده از سوی اولمان و نیز سایر زبانها نشان داد.
نتیجهگیری: نتایج آماری بازنمود حسآمیزی در زبان فارسی و مقایسه آن با سایر زبانها نشان داد که زبانها در تعامل حواس پنج¬گانه از مفاهیم حسی پایه یعنی لامسه و چشایی استفاده میکنند تا مفاهیم حسی پیشرفته یعنی بینایی و شنوایی را توصیف و بیان کنند، اما ارجحیتهای پارامتری از زبانی به زبان دیگر متفاوت است.
واژههای کلیدی: معناشناسی شناختی، حسآمیزی، استعاره مفهومی، انتقال حواس، رویکرد پیکرهای
مقالهی حاضر در چارچوب نظریهی استعارهی مفهومی (لیکاف و جانسون، 1980) حرکت استعاری را در پیکرهای مشخص از زبان فارسی مورد بررسی قرار میدهد. این پژوهش در يك تحلیل پیکرهمدار و با بهرهگيري از كليدواژههاي برگزيده و جستجو به كمك رايانه در بخشهایی از متون نمونه از فارسی معاصر که به زبان روزمرهی جامعه شباهت دارد، به استخراج استعارههایی پرداخته است که بر اساس حوزهی مبدأ حرکت شکل گرفتهاند. یافتههای پژوهش حاضر نشان میدهد که به ترتیب مفاهیم انتزاعی افکار، زمان و عواطف پربسامدترین مفاهیمی هستند که در زبان فارسی از طریق حوزهی مبدأ حرکت بیان میشوند. همچنین در محدودهی پیکرهی مورد نظر آشکار گردید که فارسیزبانان در بیان حرکت استعاری بیشتر بر اطلاعات مربوط به مسیر حرکت تأکید دارند و مسیر حرکت نقش مهمی در صورتبندی حرکت استعاری ایفا میکند. لذا، زبان فارسی با توجه به وابسته بودن به افعال مسیرنما در بیان حرکت استعاری در زمرهی زبانهای فعلبنیاد جای میگیرد.
واژههای کلیدی: استعارة مفهومی ، حرکت استعاری ، تحلیل پیکرهمدار ، زبان فعلبنیاد .
Conceptual Metaphors of Motion in Persian: A Corpus- Driven Analysis
This article studies the metaphorical motion in a sampled corpus of Persian texts, based on the framework of conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakeoff and Johnson(1980). In this article, the researchers are seeking for the conceptual metaphors, formed by the motion as their source domain. For this purpose, a corpus-driven approach was taken, using keywords in a sampled contemporary Persian texts retrieved from Persian Linguistic DataBase (PLDB).
The findings indicate that the speakers of Persian use the source domain of motion to understand some abstract notions of which the concepts of thoughts, time, and emotions are the most common ones. Findings of this corpus-driven research also revealed that for the Persian speakers, the element of the path is the most emphasized element which plays an important role in forming the metaphorical motion. Therefore due to its dependency on path-verbs, Persian is categorized as a verb-framed language. Finally, In a comparative approach, the findings in Persian where compared with the findings in English.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, metaphorical motion, corpus-driven analysis, verb-framed languages.
كليدواژهها: رسانة، تبليغات، استعارهي مفهومي، مجاز مفهومي، استعارهي تصويري، مجاز تصويري
This article studies conceptual metaphors and metonymies in a sampled corpus of National Iranian TV advertisements, based on the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and their findings on conceptual metonymy. According to Lakoff and Johnson conceptual metaphors and metonymies, work at the level of mind and their manifestations are not only in language but also in the art, customs, symbols and pictures. One of the areas of metaphor and metonymy manifestation is advertisement. Hence, a corpus of 75 TV advertisements in five groups were studied. These groups included: 1- Banks 2-Powders and Detergents 3- Foods 4- Insurance companies 5- Mobile services and Internet providers. The corpus based data revealed that the conceptual metaphors and metonymies play an important role in TV advertisements, both at the verbal and pictorial level. These metaphors were facilitated by several source domains such as: human, plant, motion, speed, (etc). In addition it was concluded that the role of conceptual metonymies is very important, especially at the pictorial level. At the end the role of culture in forming such metaphors and metonymies were discussed.
Keywords: National Iranian broadcasting, advertisement, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, pictorial metaphors.
واژههای کلیدی: استعاره مفهومی، زبانشناسي پيكرهاي، معنیشناسی شناختی، تحلیل پیکرهمدار.
The present thesis studies conceptual metaphors in a representative corpus of Persian texts. Exploiting the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB), we sampled a corpus of contemporary written texts, based on their similarity to the colloquial language of the Persian speakers, and then tried to identify and extract the relevant conceptual metaphors. The sample corpus contains 10 texts of contemporary Iranian writers, naming Hedayat, Jamalzadeh, Daneshvar, Aale -Ahmad….et al. Analyzing the corpus, the writer managed to extract nearly 2000 conceptual metaphors in the form of 600 names of the mappings. Then the conceptual metaphors classified according to the Lakoff and Johnson classification (1980) as ontological, structural and orientational, and a class of conceptual metaphors that Lakoff and Turner (1989) presented as image metaphors.
As the next step, we tried to determine the proportion of these classes comparing with each other. We concluded that the Persian speakers make use of ontological metaphors in their daily language, more than the other classes. Then we tried to determine which conceptual mappings and source domains are the most common ones in each class.
Due to the corpus-driven approach in the analysis of metaphors, considerable results obtained. For example, it was observed that the abstract concepts as life, emotions or time are understood via some concrete domains as, objects, containers, and personification. Besides, ideas about adopting a corpus-driven approach in analyzing the conceptual metaphors, and extending the sampled corpus findings to large corpora were discussed.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, corpus linguistics, cognitive semantics, corpus-driven analysis
Death is a vague, frightening and abstract concept, mostly considered as a taboo. The current study investigates the ways of conceptualizing death among Persian language speakers in a representative corpus of Persian texts. It seeks answer to the question: What kind of linguistic tools are used by Persian language speakers in order to conceptualize the phenomenon of death and what cultural elements are involved in this regard .To answer the research question, we used the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) and a selection of obituaries and epitaphs as data and attempted to identify and extract all the expressions which were directly or indirectly related to the concept of death. Using the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), by Lakoff and Johnson (1987), and cultural conceptualization by Sharifian (2011), the ways death is conceptualized were identified on the basis of a cognitive-cultural approach.
ABSTRACT
Cognitive sciences and technologies that are related to various scientific disciplines are among the new fields in Iran and the world. Cognitive linguistics, meanwhile, is one of the newest trends in this field, not more than three decades old. Metaphor is not the only subject and necessarily the most important subject of research in cognitive linguistics, but it may be said that due to its systematic framework, it is the most well-known subject with which cognitive linguistics is generally known. The present article tries to introduce and evaluate one of the remarkable works in this field, that is the book “Metaphor and Cognition” by Azita Afrashi (2018) and to provide the readers of different fields of science with the preliminaries of cognitive linguistics and the influential theory of conceptual metaphors.
Conference Presentations by Kamyar Joulaei
Keywords: National Iranian broadcasting, advertisement, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, pictorial metaphors.
INTRODUCTION: Lakoff and Johnson (1999) argue that one of the major findings of research in cognitive semantics, is that our moral cognition is largely metaphorical, growing out of a complex metaphor system containing metaphorical mappings for conceptualizing, reasoning about, and communicating our moral ideas. This research studies the moral metaphor system in Persian with a corpus-driven approach for the first time. It represents part of my attempt to contribute a Persian perspective on moral imagination through metaphor.
OBJECTIVES: The present research attempts to find the prevalent conceptual metaphors of morality and their most common source domains in Persian. Besides, Lakoff and Johnson’s work (1999) in English brought the question into my mind that whether or not conceptual metaphors for morality are culture-specific, widespread, or universal. I had a simple goal in mind, i.e., to see if the conceptual metaphors found in Persian are manifested in other languages. Finally, I would like to discuss the status of these type of conceptual metaphors. My question is: Are they primary or complex metaphors?
METHOD: To achieve the goal, based on a balanced corpus of general Persian metaphors (Joulaei, 1391) some conceptual metaphors of moralities in Persian were identified in the form of sentences of natural language use.
As the next step, several keywords were extracted out of these sentences to do a thorough search in a balanced corpus taken from the 70 million words database of PLDB (Persian Linguistic DataBase) to find the other possible metaphors of morality in Persian. Finally, the conceptual metaphors and their source domains were classified and then quantified based on their frequencies in the corpus.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The source domains for the conceptual metaphors in the corpus included: uprightness, strength, and nurturance as well as a subsystem consisting of five pairs of moral and immoral metaphors whose source concepts represent contrastive categories in our visual experience: white and black, light and dark, clear and murky, clean and dirty, pure and impure.
Besides, a decompositional analysis shows that all of these metaphors are complex rather than primary while some of them are more central than the others and they are related to one another as a radial category.
The results also showed that regardless of the differences in linguistic manifestation, Persian and English appear to exhibit a high degree of similarity in moral metaphors at the conceptual level. It can be explained based on the embodiment theory in cognitive science in that our moral cognition arises partially through metaphors from our everyday embodied experience in the physical surroundings.
KEYWORDS: Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphors, Morality Metaphors, Corpus Driven Approach.
Books by Kamyar Joulaei
As we will see in this book, synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon; In other words, it is rooted in the mechanisms of the human mind, which is reflected both in the way some people perceive the world and in our everyday language. In this book, we try to first introduce synesthesia using the findings of neuroscience and study its origin in the brain and then consider it as a cognitive phenomenon in language and study it in a corpus of Persian from a linguistic and cognitive point of view. Hence, this work has chosen an interdisciplinary approach to the study of synesthesia in language, that is, it examines this phenomenon comprehensively using neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics.
Nowadays, the use of linguistic corpora and relying on real linguistic data has become widespread and has become a necessary condition for many theoretical and applied types of research. The present book analyzes synesthesia in contemporary Persian novels for the first time with a corpus-driven approach, using a balanced corpus from a database of 100 million Persian language databases(PLDB). While using corpus methods in linguistic analysis the authors have tried to introduce the most important theories and definitions in corpus linguistics to the readers, which are considered to be the latest approach in linguistic studies.
There are also various theories about the relationship between synesthetic expressions and conceptual metaphors, which are addressed in the book. What emerged from the analysis of linguistic evidence showed a close relationship between metaphor and synesthesia; Therefore, part of the book is devoted to explaining the theory of conceptual metaphors and its place in cognitive linguistics. In addition, topics such as the embodiment hypothesis, conceptual metonymy, conceptual representation of emotions in language, and also the issue of sensory verbs in Persian will be discussed.
The relationship between synesthesia and different types of sensory transmissions in language with the issue of culture is another topic that has been discussed in this book. The results of this research made it possible to make comparisons in Persian with researches in other languages and determine the status of Persian in terms of cognitive typology among other languages for the first time. The results of this study show that the speakers of contemporary Persian use which senses as basic senses and which senses in the position of differentiating senses to express their sensory perceptions. Since synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon with a neurological basis, and on the other hand its representation in the language is influenced by cultural factors, the analysis of synesthetic expressions in Persian can lead us to a more complete understanding of this phenomenon. in addition to explaining physiological mechanisms which are universal, this study also reveals the role of culture in explaining the linguistic representation of this phenomenon through cross-linguistic comparisons.
In this book, an attempt was made to explain the statistical results of synesthetic expressions in Persian based on the embodiment hypothesis, which is one of the approaches considered in cognitive linguistics. Explaining the relationship between conceptual metaphors and the phenomena of synesthesia, studying inverse sensory transmissions, and examining monosensory and multisensory transitions were of the other issues addressed in this study. In addition, the use of corpus methods in determining dead and living sensory transmissions and conventionalized and novel sensory expressions, as well as the use of corpus concepts such as type and token in the analysis of synesthetic expressions and their use for stylistic literary works, were among the cases that were first introduced in this work.
Nearly three decades have passed since the formation of cognitive linguistics in the world and about a decade in Iran; however, this branch of linguistics in Iran is a nascent science and the volume of books that have been published in Persian in this field during the mentioned period is scanty. The present book is written based on data from Persian to introduce and explain one of the important topics in cognitive linguistics, namely synesthesia in Persian. we hoped that this book will be the beginning of a wider study of this phenomenon in Iran.
During the introduction and critique of this book, the author of this article tries to provide readers with some important concepts of cognitive linguistics and introduce new approaches to this field of study. This book is organized into 8 chapters, each of which describes one of the major topics in this field. These chapters are as follows: 1- Introduction 2- Categorization and cognition; 3- Image schemas; 4- Conceptual metaphor 5- Conceptual metonymy 6- Conceptualizing time, place, and movement; 7- Polysemy 8- Conceptual blending.
چکیده
نزدیک به سه دهه از شکلگیری زبانشناسی شناختی در جهان و کمتر از یک دهه در ایران میگذرد. با این حال این شاخه از زبانشناسی در ایران علم نوپایی محسوب میشود و حجم کتابهایی که در بازه زمانی عنوان شده در این زمینه به زبان فارسی انتشار یافتهاند انگشت شمارند. کتاب مبانی معناشناسی شناختی با تکیه بر دادههایی از زبان و فرهنگ فارسی و با نگاهی به یافتههای سایر علوم، به هدف معرفی و تببین مبانی این علم میانرشتهای نزد علاقهمندان این حوزه بهطور عام و دانشجویان این شاخه از زبانشناسی، نگاشته شده است. نوشته حاضر تلاش دارد تا ضمن معرفی و ارزیابی این اثر، به معرفی برخی مفاهیم مطرح در این زمینه بپردازد و خوانندگان را با جدیدترین دستاوردهای این حوزه آشنا سازد. نقد حاضر از 8 بخش تشکیل شده است که هر بخش به معرفی یکی از فصول کتاب میپردازد و در پایان جمعبندی کلی از مطالب بیان شده است.
کلیدواژهها: نقد کتاب، کتاب مبانی معناشناسی شناختی، زبانشناسی شناختی، معناشناسی شناختی.
Introduction: The current article is the first attempt to introduce and analyze synesthesia in Persian thoroughly. Synesthesia is a sensory and neurological phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense results in the stimulation of another or more other senses. This sensory phenomenon leaves traces in language as well. For instance, the following sentences are considered as linguistic synesthesia:
Space was filled with a sharp odor (smell → touch)
He took a cold look at me and left (vision → touch)
Ullmann (1964) proposed a hierarchy of sense transfers in linguistic synesthesia. Sense transfer refers to what senses, as the primary senses, describe the other senses as the differentiated senses. According to Ullmann’s hierarchy of sense transfer in English, tactile and vision are situated at the two ends of this hierarchy in which tactile is the most basic sense and vision is the most differentiated sense. The following figure shows the sense transfer pattern in English:
Touch → Taste → Smell → Vision → Hearing
The current research employs Ullmann's ('39')s notion as its theoretical framework. It seeks to find answers to these questions: What is the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian’s balanced corpus? What are the most frequent source and target domains in Persian synesthetic metaphors? Comparing findings in Persian with findings in other languages, and how synesthetic classification can result in a cognitive typology in languages?
This research has used obtained findings in similar research in languages other than Persian, such as English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, and German, to determine the universal principles governing the pattern of sense transfers in languages.
Methods: To answer the questions, the researchers searched the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) using some keywords related to the five senses to extract the most frequent source and target domains and determine whether Persian synesthetic metaphors follow Ullmann’s hierarchy of sense transfer or not. During this study, no experiments were performed on humans or animals. The research method is based on the ethical codes of the International Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE).
Results: The corpus-based data revealed that the most frequent source domains for synesthetic metaphors in Persian were touch and taste, and the most frequent target domains were hearing, smell, and vision, respectively. In other words, senses of hearing, smell, and vision are mostly described by touch and taste in Persian. This figure can show the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian: Touch → Taste → Vision → Smell → Hearing
Conclusion: According to the corpus data, the overall hierarchy of sense transfers in Persian is not entirely in line with Ullmann (1964) in that smell precedes vision. However, it conforms to a universal principle in that contact senses are used to describe distance senses. Touch and taste are considered contact senses, and smell, vision, and hearing are considered distance senses. Hence, the Persian data do not contradict Ullmann('39')s hierarchy in this regard since smell and vision are considered distance senses. This overall principle also governs the sense transfer hierarchy in the other mentioned languages. The studied languages (English, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, and German) use the contact senses, namely touch and taste, to describe and express the distance senses, namely sight, smell, and hearing. However, their parametric choice is which contact senses are used to describe the other senses more pervasively and which distance senses have been exposed to conceptualization more extensively.
These findings can be explained in light of the embodiment theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Accordingly, the contact senses whose domain of the function is connected and close to the body were the most frequent source domains. This is in line with what Sweetzer (1990) argues about the orientation of conceptual mappings, which originate from the body to different conceptual domains. This study’s result is significant because it allows for a cognitive typology of Persian compared to other languages under study.
Keywords: Synesthesia, Cognitive semantics, Conceptual metaphor, Cognitive typology, Corpus-based approach.
مقدمه: حسآمیزی پدیدهای ادراکی و عصب¬شناختی است که بر اساس آن، تحریک یکی از حواس موجب تحریک یک یا چند حس دیگر میشود. Ullmann (1964) برای نخستین بار سلسله¬مراتبی را برای انتقال حواس در حسآمیزی زبانی معرفی کرد. پژوهشگران مقاله حاضر اندیشه Ullmann را به عنوان چارچوب نظری انتخاب کردند تا دریابند در پیکرهای متوازن از زبان فارسی، کدامیک از حواس در بیشترین تعامل با یکدیگر هستند و نیز سلسله¬مراتب انتقال حواس در زبان فارسی چگونه است؟
روش کار: به این منظور، ابتدا پیکرهای متوازن از زبان فارسی با بهرهگیری از پایگاه دادههای زبان فارسی تنظیم شد، سپس با استفاده از کلید واژههای مربوط به حواس پنج¬گانه و حوزههای مرتبط، جملات دربردارنده موارد حسآمیزی استخراج و الگوی انتقال حواس در زبان فارسی مشخص شد.
یافتهها: دادههای برگرفته از پیکره نشان دادند که در زبان فارسی، حواسی که با بالاترین بسامد در جایگاه حوزه مبدأ و مقصد درنگاشتهای حسآمیخته واقع میشوند به ترتیب عبارتند از حس لامسه و شنوایی. همچنین سلسله مراتب انتقال حواس در زبان فارسی تفاوتهایی را با الگوی پیشنهاد شده از سوی اولمان و نیز سایر زبانها نشان داد.
نتیجهگیری: نتایج آماری بازنمود حسآمیزی در زبان فارسی و مقایسه آن با سایر زبانها نشان داد که زبانها در تعامل حواس پنج¬گانه از مفاهیم حسی پایه یعنی لامسه و چشایی استفاده میکنند تا مفاهیم حسی پیشرفته یعنی بینایی و شنوایی را توصیف و بیان کنند، اما ارجحیتهای پارامتری از زبانی به زبان دیگر متفاوت است.
واژههای کلیدی: معناشناسی شناختی، حسآمیزی، استعاره مفهومی، انتقال حواس، رویکرد پیکرهای
مقالهی حاضر در چارچوب نظریهی استعارهی مفهومی (لیکاف و جانسون، 1980) حرکت استعاری را در پیکرهای مشخص از زبان فارسی مورد بررسی قرار میدهد. این پژوهش در يك تحلیل پیکرهمدار و با بهرهگيري از كليدواژههاي برگزيده و جستجو به كمك رايانه در بخشهایی از متون نمونه از فارسی معاصر که به زبان روزمرهی جامعه شباهت دارد، به استخراج استعارههایی پرداخته است که بر اساس حوزهی مبدأ حرکت شکل گرفتهاند. یافتههای پژوهش حاضر نشان میدهد که به ترتیب مفاهیم انتزاعی افکار، زمان و عواطف پربسامدترین مفاهیمی هستند که در زبان فارسی از طریق حوزهی مبدأ حرکت بیان میشوند. همچنین در محدودهی پیکرهی مورد نظر آشکار گردید که فارسیزبانان در بیان حرکت استعاری بیشتر بر اطلاعات مربوط به مسیر حرکت تأکید دارند و مسیر حرکت نقش مهمی در صورتبندی حرکت استعاری ایفا میکند. لذا، زبان فارسی با توجه به وابسته بودن به افعال مسیرنما در بیان حرکت استعاری در زمرهی زبانهای فعلبنیاد جای میگیرد.
واژههای کلیدی: استعارة مفهومی ، حرکت استعاری ، تحلیل پیکرهمدار ، زبان فعلبنیاد .
Conceptual Metaphors of Motion in Persian: A Corpus- Driven Analysis
This article studies the metaphorical motion in a sampled corpus of Persian texts, based on the framework of conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakeoff and Johnson(1980). In this article, the researchers are seeking for the conceptual metaphors, formed by the motion as their source domain. For this purpose, a corpus-driven approach was taken, using keywords in a sampled contemporary Persian texts retrieved from Persian Linguistic DataBase (PLDB).
The findings indicate that the speakers of Persian use the source domain of motion to understand some abstract notions of which the concepts of thoughts, time, and emotions are the most common ones. Findings of this corpus-driven research also revealed that for the Persian speakers, the element of the path is the most emphasized element which plays an important role in forming the metaphorical motion. Therefore due to its dependency on path-verbs, Persian is categorized as a verb-framed language. Finally, In a comparative approach, the findings in Persian where compared with the findings in English.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, metaphorical motion, corpus-driven analysis, verb-framed languages.
كليدواژهها: رسانة، تبليغات، استعارهي مفهومي، مجاز مفهومي، استعارهي تصويري، مجاز تصويري
This article studies conceptual metaphors and metonymies in a sampled corpus of National Iranian TV advertisements, based on the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and their findings on conceptual metonymy. According to Lakoff and Johnson conceptual metaphors and metonymies, work at the level of mind and their manifestations are not only in language but also in the art, customs, symbols and pictures. One of the areas of metaphor and metonymy manifestation is advertisement. Hence, a corpus of 75 TV advertisements in five groups were studied. These groups included: 1- Banks 2-Powders and Detergents 3- Foods 4- Insurance companies 5- Mobile services and Internet providers. The corpus based data revealed that the conceptual metaphors and metonymies play an important role in TV advertisements, both at the verbal and pictorial level. These metaphors were facilitated by several source domains such as: human, plant, motion, speed, (etc). In addition it was concluded that the role of conceptual metonymies is very important, especially at the pictorial level. At the end the role of culture in forming such metaphors and metonymies were discussed.
Keywords: National Iranian broadcasting, advertisement, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, pictorial metaphors.
واژههای کلیدی: استعاره مفهومی، زبانشناسي پيكرهاي، معنیشناسی شناختی، تحلیل پیکرهمدار.
The present thesis studies conceptual metaphors in a representative corpus of Persian texts. Exploiting the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB), we sampled a corpus of contemporary written texts, based on their similarity to the colloquial language of the Persian speakers, and then tried to identify and extract the relevant conceptual metaphors. The sample corpus contains 10 texts of contemporary Iranian writers, naming Hedayat, Jamalzadeh, Daneshvar, Aale -Ahmad….et al. Analyzing the corpus, the writer managed to extract nearly 2000 conceptual metaphors in the form of 600 names of the mappings. Then the conceptual metaphors classified according to the Lakoff and Johnson classification (1980) as ontological, structural and orientational, and a class of conceptual metaphors that Lakoff and Turner (1989) presented as image metaphors.
As the next step, we tried to determine the proportion of these classes comparing with each other. We concluded that the Persian speakers make use of ontological metaphors in their daily language, more than the other classes. Then we tried to determine which conceptual mappings and source domains are the most common ones in each class.
Due to the corpus-driven approach in the analysis of metaphors, considerable results obtained. For example, it was observed that the abstract concepts as life, emotions or time are understood via some concrete domains as, objects, containers, and personification. Besides, ideas about adopting a corpus-driven approach in analyzing the conceptual metaphors, and extending the sampled corpus findings to large corpora were discussed.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor, corpus linguistics, cognitive semantics, corpus-driven analysis
Death is a vague, frightening and abstract concept, mostly considered as a taboo. The current study investigates the ways of conceptualizing death among Persian language speakers in a representative corpus of Persian texts. It seeks answer to the question: What kind of linguistic tools are used by Persian language speakers in order to conceptualize the phenomenon of death and what cultural elements are involved in this regard .To answer the research question, we used the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) and a selection of obituaries and epitaphs as data and attempted to identify and extract all the expressions which were directly or indirectly related to the concept of death. Using the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), by Lakoff and Johnson (1987), and cultural conceptualization by Sharifian (2011), the ways death is conceptualized were identified on the basis of a cognitive-cultural approach.
ABSTRACT
Cognitive sciences and technologies that are related to various scientific disciplines are among the new fields in Iran and the world. Cognitive linguistics, meanwhile, is one of the newest trends in this field, not more than three decades old. Metaphor is not the only subject and necessarily the most important subject of research in cognitive linguistics, but it may be said that due to its systematic framework, it is the most well-known subject with which cognitive linguistics is generally known. The present article tries to introduce and evaluate one of the remarkable works in this field, that is the book “Metaphor and Cognition” by Azita Afrashi (2018) and to provide the readers of different fields of science with the preliminaries of cognitive linguistics and the influential theory of conceptual metaphors.
Keywords: National Iranian broadcasting, advertisement, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, pictorial metaphors.
INTRODUCTION: Lakoff and Johnson (1999) argue that one of the major findings of research in cognitive semantics, is that our moral cognition is largely metaphorical, growing out of a complex metaphor system containing metaphorical mappings for conceptualizing, reasoning about, and communicating our moral ideas. This research studies the moral metaphor system in Persian with a corpus-driven approach for the first time. It represents part of my attempt to contribute a Persian perspective on moral imagination through metaphor.
OBJECTIVES: The present research attempts to find the prevalent conceptual metaphors of morality and their most common source domains in Persian. Besides, Lakoff and Johnson’s work (1999) in English brought the question into my mind that whether or not conceptual metaphors for morality are culture-specific, widespread, or universal. I had a simple goal in mind, i.e., to see if the conceptual metaphors found in Persian are manifested in other languages. Finally, I would like to discuss the status of these type of conceptual metaphors. My question is: Are they primary or complex metaphors?
METHOD: To achieve the goal, based on a balanced corpus of general Persian metaphors (Joulaei, 1391) some conceptual metaphors of moralities in Persian were identified in the form of sentences of natural language use.
As the next step, several keywords were extracted out of these sentences to do a thorough search in a balanced corpus taken from the 70 million words database of PLDB (Persian Linguistic DataBase) to find the other possible metaphors of morality in Persian. Finally, the conceptual metaphors and their source domains were classified and then quantified based on their frequencies in the corpus.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The source domains for the conceptual metaphors in the corpus included: uprightness, strength, and nurturance as well as a subsystem consisting of five pairs of moral and immoral metaphors whose source concepts represent contrastive categories in our visual experience: white and black, light and dark, clear and murky, clean and dirty, pure and impure.
Besides, a decompositional analysis shows that all of these metaphors are complex rather than primary while some of them are more central than the others and they are related to one another as a radial category.
The results also showed that regardless of the differences in linguistic manifestation, Persian and English appear to exhibit a high degree of similarity in moral metaphors at the conceptual level. It can be explained based on the embodiment theory in cognitive science in that our moral cognition arises partially through metaphors from our everyday embodied experience in the physical surroundings.
KEYWORDS: Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphors, Morality Metaphors, Corpus Driven Approach.
As we will see in this book, synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon; In other words, it is rooted in the mechanisms of the human mind, which is reflected both in the way some people perceive the world and in our everyday language. In this book, we try to first introduce synesthesia using the findings of neuroscience and study its origin in the brain and then consider it as a cognitive phenomenon in language and study it in a corpus of Persian from a linguistic and cognitive point of view. Hence, this work has chosen an interdisciplinary approach to the study of synesthesia in language, that is, it examines this phenomenon comprehensively using neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics.
Nowadays, the use of linguistic corpora and relying on real linguistic data has become widespread and has become a necessary condition for many theoretical and applied types of research. The present book analyzes synesthesia in contemporary Persian novels for the first time with a corpus-driven approach, using a balanced corpus from a database of 100 million Persian language databases(PLDB). While using corpus methods in linguistic analysis the authors have tried to introduce the most important theories and definitions in corpus linguistics to the readers, which are considered to be the latest approach in linguistic studies.
There are also various theories about the relationship between synesthetic expressions and conceptual metaphors, which are addressed in the book. What emerged from the analysis of linguistic evidence showed a close relationship between metaphor and synesthesia; Therefore, part of the book is devoted to explaining the theory of conceptual metaphors and its place in cognitive linguistics. In addition, topics such as the embodiment hypothesis, conceptual metonymy, conceptual representation of emotions in language, and also the issue of sensory verbs in Persian will be discussed.
The relationship between synesthesia and different types of sensory transmissions in language with the issue of culture is another topic that has been discussed in this book. The results of this research made it possible to make comparisons in Persian with researches in other languages and determine the status of Persian in terms of cognitive typology among other languages for the first time. The results of this study show that the speakers of contemporary Persian use which senses as basic senses and which senses in the position of differentiating senses to express their sensory perceptions. Since synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon with a neurological basis, and on the other hand its representation in the language is influenced by cultural factors, the analysis of synesthetic expressions in Persian can lead us to a more complete understanding of this phenomenon. in addition to explaining physiological mechanisms which are universal, this study also reveals the role of culture in explaining the linguistic representation of this phenomenon through cross-linguistic comparisons.
In this book, an attempt was made to explain the statistical results of synesthetic expressions in Persian based on the embodiment hypothesis, which is one of the approaches considered in cognitive linguistics. Explaining the relationship between conceptual metaphors and the phenomena of synesthesia, studying inverse sensory transmissions, and examining monosensory and multisensory transitions were of the other issues addressed in this study. In addition, the use of corpus methods in determining dead and living sensory transmissions and conventionalized and novel sensory expressions, as well as the use of corpus concepts such as type and token in the analysis of synesthetic expressions and their use for stylistic literary works, were among the cases that were first introduced in this work.
Nearly three decades have passed since the formation of cognitive linguistics in the world and about a decade in Iran; however, this branch of linguistics in Iran is a nascent science and the volume of books that have been published in Persian in this field during the mentioned period is scanty. The present book is written based on data from Persian to introduce and explain one of the important topics in cognitive linguistics, namely synesthesia in Persian. we hoped that this book will be the beginning of a wider study of this phenomenon in Iran.