الهام کاویانی فردزاده

The pervasive presence of metaphorical conceptualizations in human everyday life has long been a subject of interest for cognitive linguistics researchers. This study investigates the use of the source domain “up/down” in a multimodal medium like cinema, drawing upon Lakoff and Johnson's (1980a, 2003) conceptual metaphor theory, Forceville's (2006, 2008, and 2016) theory of pictorial and multimodal metaphors, and Kövecses's (2020) views on visual metaphors. The goal is to explore the application of orientational metaphors with this source domain not only in verbal but also in visual forms. To achieve this, the Persian-language feature films, “Dancing in the Dust” and “Fireworks Wednesday,” were analyzed. The findings reveal that the filmmaker employs visual representations of up/down concepts as a metaphorical source domain to convey abstract concepts through conceptual metaphors. In both films, these metaphors are often employed solely in the visual mode to ensure the audience's unconscious understanding of the characters' abstract situations. The widespread presence of conceptual metaphors related to this source domain in Persian-language films indicates their inherent familiarity and primacy in the minds of Iranian viewers, allowing directors to frequently use them for character development and plot progression, and effectively convey their intended messages which the audience likely grasps subconsciously.

This article explores the polysemy of four negative non-verbal prefixes in Persian language (zedd ‎‎'against, opposite of', bi 'without', nā 'not' and qejr 'not, non-') based on Principled Polysemy ‎framework (Tyler and Evans 2001, 2003). First, the primary sense of each prefix is determined ‎and then it is explained how non-primary senses are derived from the primary one, hence ‎demonstrating the semantic network of each prefix as a radial category. In this research, using ‎AntConc software (Anthony, 2014), first all the occurrences of the four prefixes were extracted ‎from the Hamshahri Corpus Version 2 (AleAhmad, Amiri, Darrudi, Rahgozar & Oroumchian, ‎‎2009) and then in order to analyze research data, some of them were randomly selected. The ‎findings of the study indicate that only in three of the four prefixes under study, polysemy is ‎observed, and that the frequency of use, ease of derivation and predominance in the semantic ‎network are the best criteria for determining the primary sense. The conceptual phenomenon ‎involved in the polysemy of these prefixes is metonymy. Data analysis shows that metonymical ‎shift occurs at two levels: at the level of morpheme/prefix sense and at the level of word-‎formation, and that the former leads to more straightforward relations within the semantic ‎network. This is due to the fact that the latter requires a more complex line of imagination which ‎automatically translates into a corresponding complexity of relations in the semantic network and ‎significant reduction in the type frequency of non-primary senses as a whole.‎