The Grammar of Linguistic Metaphors in Persian based on Deignan’s (2005, 2006) Framework: A Case Study of ‘Hand’ as the Source Domain

This study aims to analyze the grammar of linguistic metaphors in Persian based on the theoretical framework of Deignan (2005, 2006). The purpose of the present study is to answer the questions “what role does grammar (part of speech, inflection, lexical grammar) play in the metaphorical representation of hand as one of the members of the conceptual domain of human body?", and "how does each of the three levels of grammar affect the metaphorical representation of the mentioned conceptual domain?" In other words, which level does play the more significant role? The second version of Hamshahri corpus was used to answer the research questions to determine the function of grammar in the metaphorical representation of hand as a source domain. The findings signify that the first level of Deignan’s framework has no influence upon the metaphorical usage of hand. From among the components of the second level, singular inflection in both metaphorical and literal uses is the only significant form. In the third level, the relatively fixed patterns in the metaphorical meanings and the free syntactic patterns in the literal uses show how metaphorical meanings are shaped.