A Corpus-based Approach to Cognitive Metaphors in Persian: The Study of Fear Target Domain

The present research investigates the metaphorical conceptualization of fear target domain in Persian based on Conceptual Theory of Metaphor. For the mentioned purpose, the Corpus-based method of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis is applied to Hamshahri Corpus 2 and after data analysis, 39 source domains are identified for the fear target domain. One of the results of this research is determining the productivity of all the source domains based on their frequency of occurrences in the corpus. Also, after comparing the results of the present research with those of ones in which collecting data for fear domain has been done by traditional methods, the superiority of the Corpus-based method of the present research is approved. Another significant finding of the present research is the identification of prototypical and non-prototypical models of the fear target domain in Persian.