The Metaphorical Conceptualization of Love in English and Arabic Songs: A Contrastive Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1206.19Keywords:
English and Arabic songs, cognitive metaphor, contrastive analysis, love metaphorAbstract
This study examined the metaphor of love conceptualization in English and Arabic emotional songs. It aimed to contrastively analyze the construct of the love metaphor in the two languages based on the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff (1987, 1993), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and Turner and Lakoff (1989). Content analysis was applied to analyze a corpus of 200 songs was randomly chosen for various Arab and English singers, and all these songs were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. The study found that the conceptualization of the love metaphor is common in both English and Arabic. Also, 19 themes of love metaphor representation have been revealed. Structural metaphor topped other types of metaphor in which the themes of journey, magic, madness, and unity were found to be used most. Moreover, love as a nutrient, person, and captive had more occurrences in ontological metaphor. However, English songs have cited very limited cases of orientational metaphor, Arabic songs have not had any cases which might be contributed to the rarity of using place prepositions to reflect someone’s orientation. Arabic songs have emphasized the themes of fluid, fire, and place compared to the English songs that have highlighted the themes of magic, madness, war, and game.
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