A Comparative Study of Orientational Conceptual Metaphors in Novels Shohar-e Ahoo Khanoom by Afghani and Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro

Cognitive linguistics considers linguistic knowledge as dependent on thought and cognition and introduces conceptual metaphor as a tool for how to think and linguistic behaviors. By examining it, similarities and differences of cultures can be obtained. Orientational metaphor is a form of conceptual metaphor in which abstract concepts are oriented in language. In directional metaphor, a whole system of concepts is organized in relation to another system, and since they are related to spatial directions such as up, down, inside, and outside, they are called directional metaphors. These metaphors are rooted in the physical and cultural experience of humans, and despite the fact that the polar opposites of high, low, and its components are considered physical in nature, the directional metaphors based on them are made, and they can be different from culture to culture. Accordingly, in the present study, this metaphor has been studied and compared in two novels “Shohar-e Ahoo Khanoom” by Afghani and “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro through the descriptive-analytical method. For this purpose, research data were extracted with 36 orientational conceptual metaphors (16 cases of Afghani and 20 cases of Ishiguro) and their differences and similarities in the fields of the source domain and their mapping were investigated. The results showed that the similarities between the conceptual metaphors based on human understanding of the category of direction in the two languages are greater than the differences. In general, it shows that the two authors pay the same attention to this metaphor. By regarding the little metaphorical differences in the two languages, we conclude that although both authors have used a single cultural model to produce a metaphor of orientation, cultural and geographical differences produce different mapping.