Document Type : applied research

Authors

• Zahra Abbasi ¹
• Maryam Daneshgar ²
• Amir Cheraqian ³

¹ Department of Persian Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University

² Department of Literature, Academy of Persian Language and Literature

³ Graduated . Persian literature, Tarbiat Modares University

Abstract

In order to analyze conceptual metaphors in senior students texts, the research examined Academy of Persian Language and Literature corpus which was collected during taking a national achievement test called "AMZA". Conceptual metaphors were analyzed in 272 texts from three different majors- science, humanities, and mathematics- based on Afrashi and Hesami's (1392) proposed classification. Findings show that conceptual metaphors are used by girls more than boys and the difference is statistically meaningful. There wasn’t any statistical difference among students' conceptual metaphor usage in error level of five percent and students of different majors used conceptual metaphors equally. Among different types of metaphors, objective- to- subjective, objective-to- objective, and orientational metaphors have the most frequency in use. Structure-based and container-based metaphors have the most frequency of use among different types of objective- to- objective metaphors and its difference with other types is statistically significant. Examining origin and purpose fields in conceptual metaphors shows that concepts "human, place, container, object, and up" have the most frequency respectively in origin fields and "sky, life, time, future, and God" have the most frequency in purpose fields. These fields in students' writings are based on Kovecses's classification (2010) and indeed more various.

Keywords

• “conceptual metaphors”
• “text corpus”
• “objective-to-objective metaphors”
• “animate-based metaphor”
• “objective-to-subjective metaphor”