A cognitive semantic analysis of english and arabic verbs of visual perception ‘see’ and ‘ra’a’ in fiction writing

Sweetser (1990) claims that vision is the prime sense organ that motivates metaphors of intellect, such as ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’ and ‘thinking’. She also asserts that these metaphors are cross-cultural phenomena, possibly universal in human thoughts and speech. In the light of this claim, this study focuses on whether the metaphors of visual perception are really as universal as has been argued in the literature as research in non-Western languages has demonstrated that the metaphors are not universal. Thus, this study aims: 1) To unravel the conceptual metaphors underlying the linguistic expressions of the English and Arabic verbs of visual perception see and ىأر (ra’a) in fiction writing, 2) To compare the conceptual metaphors underlying the linguistic expressions of the English and Arabic verbs of visual perception see and ىأر in fiction writing, 3) To examine how human physiology motivates the conceptual metaphors underlying the English and Arabic verbs of visual perception see and ىأر , and 4) To determine the role of culture in the motivation of conceptual metaphors underlying the English and Arabic verbs of visual perception see and ىأر . This study adopts a qualitative approach, and is situated within the field of cognitive semantics. Two comparable corpora of English and Arabic fiction writing between the period of 2010 and 2017 were compiled from different sources, with each of the corpora comprising two million words. Specifically, a sample consisting of 2,000 examples of the English verb of visual perception see and the Arabic verb ىأر was randomly extracted from the corpus using the AntConc 3.5.0 and Ghawwas_V4.6 concordancers. The Metaphor Identification Procedures (MIP) were used to identify the metaphorical linguistic expressions in the corpus, and Lakoff and Johnson’s (2003), Sweetser’s (1990) and Ibarretxe-Antunano’s (2013a; 2013b) analytical frameworks were adopted for data analysis. The data analysis revealed many similar conceptual metaphors in both English and Arabic. The findings also indicate that the similarity between the unravelled English and Arabic conceptual metaphors is not a mere coincidence or random, but these metaphors are motivated by biological as well as cultural factors. As for the motivation of the conceptual metaphors, the human physiology seems to govern the conceptualisation of the verbs of visual perception in both languages. Moreover, the motivation of the conceptual metaphors can be accounted for by cultural factors related to English and Arabic, namely, mythology, religion and philosophy. To conclude, the findings of this study support Sweetser’s claim regarding the universality of conceptual metaphors related to the verbs of visual perception and the motivation of the metaphors by human physiology and culture.

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