An Image-Schematic View to Guilaki Proverbs in the Domain of Food and Its Related Concepts

Proverbs are fixed sentential expressions that express the well-known truth, social norms or moral concerns of a specific culture. Therefore, they have a linguistic-cultural aspect and are transmitted through generations and applied to various states of affairs in the world. Since most proverbial expressions are metaphorical in nature which rooted in bodily experiments, the present paper offers an image-schematic view to Guilaki proverbs in the domain of food and its related concepts. It takes up the twin task of distinguishing the image schemas in Guilaki proverbs and of defining their domain of semantic usages. The proverbs of this qualitative research have been collected in a library research method and analyzed based on Johnson’s (1987) opinions. The findings of the research reveal that the path, control and spatial schemas are used in Guilaki proverbs. They also showed that the desirable cultural concepts like kindness, hospitality and faithfulness are simultaneously applied alongside undesirable ones such as corruption, betray and ungratefulness.