A Perceptual Approach to Understanding Metaphor in Persian

A crucial point in studying metaphor is to consider a reliable linguistic unit for understanding metaphors. The traditional search of meaning based on words has never been a success in proper analysis of metaphors. This article in its attempt to find out the more reliable units than words for getting the deep meaning of metaphors concentrates on the metaphorical adjectives, and proves that to understand these adjectives one should go beyond the lexical level to deal with the co-occurring units in the syntactic level. In this regards the semantic unit for understanding metaphors is no longer “word” but “sentence”.