Metaphor and Culture

ISBN-13: 9783640606795 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 32 str.

Katharina Eder

Opis

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Vienna (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: The main questions that arise given this way of thinking about the connection between metaphor and culture are on the one hand -To what extent do people share their metaphors?-, which at first seemingly trivial becomes much more significant and interesting if we ourselves -To what extent do people around the world share their understandings of images and aspects of the world they live in?-. These questions are of particular interest to me, and were decisive for me regarding the selection of the topic of this paper. In fact, the field of -Metaphor and Culture- comprises many subtopics, such as for instance -Universality in Metaphorical Conceptualization-, -Cross-Cultural and Within-Cultural Variation in Metaphor-, -Conceptual Metaphors and Their Linguistic Expression in Different Languages-, -Metaphor and Cultural Models-, or -The Causes of Metaphor Variation-. Since I did not want to be too general in this paper, and also wanted to give insight into some practical aspects of the topic, I decided to concentrate on a two specific -subtopics-, and deal with them in greater detail. In the first part, the paper will shed light on a study by Talebinejad & Dastjerdis (2005), who chose animal metaphors for the comparison in two typologically different languages, namely English and Persian. The second part of this paper will address the -Causes of Variation in Metaphor-, whereas the focus lies exclusively on the field of -Differential Experience-.