The conceptualization of love in Persian creative and communicative language

This paper is an attempt to study Kövecses’s (2000a) claim on the stability of emotion metaphors during time with regard to love metaphors in Persian language. In other words, the aim is to see whether love metaphorical expressions in Persian everyday language underlie the same conceptual metaphors in Persian creative language such as poetry. At the same time, we aim to see if similar conceptualization of love exists in English everyday language. Also the paper seeks to find the cognitive grounding of love metaphors in Persian according to Kövecses’s (2012) cognitive experiential basis of metaphors. The results of study indicate that both literary and ordinary love Persian expressions are built upon the same conceptual metaphors that account for love expressions in English everyday language too. Also, it was discovered that among four suggested ways of grounding conceptual metaphors, two of them were more likely to motivate love metaphors in Persian.