Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Assistant Professor in Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Malayer University, Malayer, Iran.
Abstract
The study of the colloquial idioms, which are used to establish and maintain social relations with others, is a way to realize how people think. The following descriptive-analytical study aims at investigating the concepts and explaining the cognitive motivations in the Persian colloquial idioms which include the word "bread". The data required for the study were extracted from Najafi's Persian Folklore Idioms (2008/1387) and analyzed within the approaches discussed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Kövecses (2002) to determine the cognitive motivations in the idioms in terms of metaphor, metonymy and conventional knowledge. Findings showed that "bread" motivates the formation of the abstract concepts of "INCOME", "GRATITUDE", "SUPPORT", "INTERFERENCE", "TROUBLESOMENESS", "HONOR", "OWE", "MEANNESS", "MISTAKES" and "OPPORTUNISM" in the idioms. The study, also, revealed that the idioms which contain the concrete domain of "bread" are conceptualized by more than one cognitive mechanism, and the formation of the idioms cannot be related to only one mechanism. Hence, it could be concluded that idioms are motivated by multiple cognitive mechanisms.
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