Pride Conceptualization in English and Bosnian Idioms

Pride Conceptualization in English and Bosnian Idioms

Music, Jasmina
Mustafic, Almir

The paper analyses the concept of pride in English and Bosnian idioms through the application of cognitive theory: the theory of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. The first part of the paper presents some of the major traditional theories on idioms, which view phraseological units as strings of words whose meaning is not a composition of the meaning of idiom’s component parts, and is, hence, arbitrary. We then introduce cognitive linguistic view on idioms, which brings new perspective to the analysis of their meaning, showing that it is not arbitrary, as traditionally believed, but quite the opposite, motivated by various cognitive mechanisms and our perception of the world surrounding us. The second part of the paper deals with cognitive mechanisms; conceptual metaphor and metonymy, showing how these function in structuring our thought and language through various mappings from one conceptual domain to another, or in case of metonymy inside one domain. After defining conceptual domain of PRIDE, and various other concepts that the concept of PRIDE involves, such as CONCEIT, SELF-ESTEEM, SELF-ASSURANCE, ARROGANCE, SUPERIORITY, we discuss various metaphors and metonymies for pride proposed by Kövecses (1986), showing that most of these motivate the meaning of idioms, e.g. PRIDE IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER, CONCEITED PERSON IS BIG, INTERFERENCE WITH NORMAL MENTAL FUNCTIONING FOR PRIDE, FORMS OF WALKING FOR PRIDE, etc. Finally, we discuss interaction of these cognitive mechanisms in helping us conceptualize the world surrounding us, but also facilitate the understanding of these abstract concepts

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

873