Conceptual Metaphor Of Hand In English Idiom Analysis

793 Words4 Pages

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggested that there are three main kinds, which are structural, orientational and ontological metaphors. The first category which accounts for the highest number acts as an instrument shaping the sophisticated and abstract concepts such as love and time into the concrete and less complex ones like journey and money. In orientational metaphor, spatial awareness about up versus down, front versus back or inside versus and outside gives rise to such metaphors. The third type specifies domains that cannot be measured like ideas or emotions to physical things. It is believed that conceptual metaphor is one of the “cognitive devices” that motivate the semantic structures of idioms, the general meanings of which are established by the “conventional knowledge”, and therefore the motivation seems rather cognitive than linguistic by nature (Kövecses, 2010). Besides that, Nguyen (2016) pointed out that one conceptual metaphor can be indicated by more than one idiomatic expression in language. …show more content…

In the following mappings, hand will be in the role of the source domain and conceptualized in other target domains. The following ontological metaphors of hand originate from one perception that is human hand is conceptualized as a container. The first metaphor, the most popular one, maps the relation between the hand and the right to control, which comes from the daily experience that if something is placed in our hands, we can manipulate it in the way we want. Motivated by the same conceptual metaphor, all those idioms share the basic meaning which is the act of imposing the impact on somebody or something by treating power as an object inside the hand: A firm/strict/heavy hand; At the hands of someone/at someone’s

Open Document