Article published In:
Cognitive Linguistic StudiesVol. 1:2 (2014) ► pp.252–270
Metaphorical eternity in action
The nonlinguistic realization of death metaphors in Iranian culture
Conceptual metaphors can be made real in culture and structure many areas of human experience in nonlinguistic ways (Kövecses 2005). In this paper, relying on a cognitive account of metaphor, I attempted to find out in which ways death metaphors manifest themselves in Iranian culture. Analyzing the rituals of death in Iran, it was revealed that Iranians rely on a set of basic concetual metaphors to conceptualize the taboo of death. Heavily motivated by religious instructions, the whole scenario of death is conceptualized in terms of human physical and psychological experiences. In addition to the event of death, which is conceptualized via the highly generic DEATH IS LIFE metaphor, in this culture, an important mapping of this metaphor, that is, THE DEAD ARE EMOTIONAL BEINGS, is extensively realized and enacted, which provides a unique subsystem for making euphemistic reference to death. Furthermore, the paper comes to the conclusion that most of the entailments of the source domains and some of the source domains turn into social-physical reality. The whole system of death rituals as structured by metaphors imply that we metaphorically never die.
References (24)
Afreh, E.S. (2011). Metaphors of death in Akan. In H. Lauer, N.A.A. Amfo & J.A. Anderson (Eds.), Identity meets nationality: Voices from the humanities (pp. 35–53). Ghana: University of Ghana.
Allan, K., & Burridge, K. (2006). Forbidden words: Taboo and the censoring of language. Cambridge University Press. 
Bultnick, B. (1998). Metaphors we die by: Conceptualizations of death in English and their implications for the theory of metaphor. Antwerpen: Universiteit Antwerpen.
Crespo Fernandez, E. (2006). The language of death: Euphemism and conceptual metaphorization in Victorian obituaries. SKY Journal of Linguistics, 191, 101–130.
CrespoFernández, E. (2011). Euphemistic conceptual metaphors in epitaphs from highgate cemetery. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 9(1), 198–225.
Csabi, S. (2001). The concept of America in the puritan mind. Language and Literature, 101, 195–209.
Forceville, C. (1996). Pictorial metaphor in advertising. London and New York: Routledge.
Kövecses, Z. (1995). Understanding the statue of liberty. In Z. Kövecses (Ed.), New approaches to American English (pp. 129–138). Budapest: EötvösLorand University.
. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction. (2nd ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krzeszowsky, T.P. (2002). From target to source: Metaphors made real. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & K. Turewicz (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics today (pp. 139–158). Frankfurt and Main: Peter Lang.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things. What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 202–251). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. (1994). What is metaphor. Advances in connectionist and neural computation theory. In J.A. Barnden & K.J. Holyoak (Eds.), Analogy, metaphor and reminding (pp. 203–258). New Jersey: Intellect Books.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marin-Arrese, J.I. (1996). To die, to sleep: A contrastive study of metaphors for death and dying in English and Spanish. Language Sciences, 18(1–2), 37–52.
Mazur, A. (2011). Conceptualizations of death. Beyond Philology, 81, 21–54.
Nyakoe, D.G., Matu, P.M., & Ongarora, D.O. (2012). Conceptualization of ‘death as journey’ and ‘death as rest’ in EkeGusii euphemism. Theory & Practice in Language Studies, 2,(7), 1452–1457.
Özçalişkan, Ş. (2003). In a caravanserai with two doors I am walking day and night: Metaphors of death and life in Turkish. Cognitive Linguistics, 14(4), 281–320.
Sexton, J. (1997). The semantics of death and dying: Metaphor and morality. A Review of General Semantics, 54(3), 333–345.
Shore, B. (1996). Culture in mind: Cognition, culture and the problem of meaning. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Silaški, N. (2011). Metaphors and euphemisms: The case of death in English and Serbain. ФИЛОЛОШКИ ПРЕГЛЕД, 38(2), 101–113.