Cognitive Poetics and Body-Part Metaphors: The Cultural Models of Language and Thought in Sadi's Bustan

In the field of cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics, researchers have emphasized metaphor’s important role in conceptualizing world experiences. In this respect, body parts have always been considered as a source domain in structuring various concepts in most languages and they’ve been exploiting the cultural models of each language in this deed. So, in order to investigate the interaction between metaphor, body, and culture in Persian, the present study tries to analyze some body-part metaphors including del (heart-stomach), jegar (liver) and chechm (eye). The data was collected from Sadi’s Bustan which is the demonstrative of Persian culture and has a great deal of body-parts metaphors. The analysis of the metaphorical expressions was carried out within a theoretical framework based on insights from cognitive linguistics and poetics. The data analyzed shows that Iranian cultural models, derived from Iranian traditional medicine and Persian spiritual belief systems such as the Sufi worldview and Islamic religion are some factors that affect the structure of cross-domain conceptual mappings.