An Approach to Metaphor in Theoretical Framework of Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive linguistics is one of the modern linguistics schools, and two of its prominent theorists are Lakoff and Langacker. They believe that unlike what Chomsky and his advocates believe the basis of linguistics studies must be meaning and the cognitive faculty of human beings must be considered in this kind of study. One of the hypotheses of cognitive linguistics in Langacker's words is that semantics is conceptualization. Conceptualization is an expression which Langacker has used and it is derived from Saussure's view of language. One of the evidences that cognitive linguists put forward to proving the hypothesis is the conceptual theory of metaphor which this paper is about.