Metaphor and its function in everyday speech of Persian speakers )Relying on Persian language students of Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz Branch(

Subject Areas : Persian Language and Literature

Gholamhassan oraki ^{1 *} , Elkhas vaysi ²

1 - Ph.D.in linguistics. Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran
2 - Associate Professor, Department of linguistics &Foreign Language, Payam Noor University, Iran

Received: 2017-05-23 Accepted : 2017-06-02 Published : 2017-08-23

Keywords:

Abstract :

Metaphor is the most commonly linguistic phenomenon debated by the scientists, philosophers, writers and linguists. This research aims at describing the function of the metaphor in everyday speech samples of Persian speakers. To this purpose, the authors randomly selected fifty Persian speaker students among others in the college of Human Sciences, in Islamic Azad University of Ahwaz. Required samples collected via recording 30 hours of their speech presented in three different predetermined linguistic contexts. As many as 122metaphorical expressions were extracted, out of 1000 recorded sentences. Our statistical analysis and the results indicated that a significant part of the Persian speaker’s samples are metaphorical and various types of conceptual metaphors such as ontological metaphors, structural metaphors, event structure metaphors, proverbs and stereotyped phrases could be found in their speech samples. The results also made it clear that the linguistic context has remarkable effects on the use of metaphor in discourse.  In other words, in the formal situation, the use of metaphor was less than the informal situation. That is to say, the more formal the linguistic context is metaphor is less frequently used and the more linguistic context is informal, using metaphor is commonly more frequent.