engleski

Contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors in English and Croatian: universality and variation in orientational metaphors

Conceptual metaphor is one of the central topics of cognitive linguistics. One of the main questions that the theory of conceptual metaphor is still debating over is that of the universality of conceptual metaphors. This paper looks at this question from the perspective of orientational metaphors, which are often quoted as universal (the most notable being HAPPY IS UP) due to their being based on physical experience. By comparing and contrasting orientational metaphors in English and Croatian on both the grammatical and semantic level we try to see whether any one of the two languages makes more use of these particular metaphors. Based on this, we examine whether orientational metaphors are universal or not. The methods we use in researching metaphors are corpora analysis (BNC, COCA, HNK) and a study of native speaker’s intuitions (translating sentences containing metaphorical expressions from English into Croatian). In the analysis, we relate English and Croatian sentences by comparing four parameters: word form, literal meaning, figurative meaning and conceptual metaphor. Our research has concluded several things: first, that the orientational metaphors in Croatian and English are basically the same (with a few minor exceptions), second, that English makes heavier use of expressions from the domain of orientation, whereas these expressions are translated to Croatian in a variety of ways, not all of them using the same conceptual metaphor. Thirdly, what our research has also shown is that only the most general (i.e. most schematic) orientational metaphors can be thought of as universal. In our opinion, only three of the conceptual metaphors found in the research come under that title, namely HAPPY IS UP, MORE IS UP and GOOD IS UP.

conceptual metaphors ; universality ; variation ; orientational metaphors ; English ; Croatian

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