Investigating Mental Schemas in Tehrani Proverbs(Book of Ghand-o-Namak)

Proverbs in the reflection of culture and individual and social identity is one of the most important categories in language studies. People of every society and ethnicity use different methods and convey their meaning in the form of cultural and literary delicacies to others. Considering the importance of image schemas in cognitive semantics as one of the most important linguistic mechanisms and since little study and research has been done on Iranian proverbs and dialects, the need for this research was doubled. The question in this study is what is the frequency and type of imaginary schemas used in Tehrani proverbs and are there any proverbs without mental schemas? The purpose of this research, which is descriptive-analytical and qualitative, is to investigate the schemas of metaphors in the body of Tehrani proverbs based on the Evans and Green’s schemas model (2006) according to cognitive semantics. The statistical population includes the book Ghand-o-Namak (all Tehrani proverbs), in the form of purposeful sampling and contains 2000 proverbs. The results indicate that general types of image schemas such as containment, path, directional and force schemas are found in Tehrani proverbs, but containment schemas have the highest frequency compared to other schemas. Which is due to the urban lifestyle in the formation of this type of mental schemas and its metaphors.