A comparative study of the conceptual metaphors of time in Persian and English

- From a cognitive perspective, metaphor is viewed as one of the important aspects and a fundamental part of the everyday use of language. Metaphor is generally defined as a means to talk about a more abstract conceptual domain in terms of another, more concrete domain. The mapping between the two domains is expressed through some conceptual metaphors. The present study is a comparative analysis of the conceptual metaphors of time in Persian and English. In doing so, different expressions of time in the two languages were categorised into the relevant conceptual metaphors, to be compared to find any similarities and differences in this respect. The expressions of time were analysed under eight different conceptual metaphors. It is revealed that the two languages show a very similar conceptualisation of time-related expressions. Except for a few minor differences, both languages generally appear to use the same metaphoric structures to express time. The use of similar collocations with time words in most cases counts as evidence for the similarities between the two languages in their conceptualisation of time.


Introduction
Metaphor is considered as one of the important aspects of language in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;Taylor, 1995;inter alia); and it is in fact its view of metaphor that differentiates cognitive linguistics most from other theories of language (Lee, 2001: 6). Put in different words, "an important characteristic of cognitive semantics is the central role in thought and language assigned to metaphor" (Saeed, 2009: 360).
Traditionally, metaphor has always been viewed as a figure of speech or a rhetorical device peculiar to literary and poetic language. The classical view of metaphor, dating back to the time of Aristotle, regards it as a decorative addition to ordinary plain language, used at certain times to gain certain effects (Saeed, 2009: 359). This view portrays metaphor as something outside the normal use of language which requires special forms of interpretation from listeners or readers (ibid.). Along with this view of metaphor as something deviated from normal language use, Botha (1968) distinguishes between novel creative metaphors, and established or dead metaphors. Botha claims that novel metaphors lie outside the study of a speaker's competence. But once a metaphorical expression is established, the speaker's internalised rule system is modified over time. Metaphor thus ceases to be an instance of deviance anymore; that is, it ceases to be metaphorical. The metaphorical sense of a lexical item is now listed in the lexicon along with its other "conventional senses" (Botha, 1968: 201).
The cognitive view, on the other hand, sees metaphor as a fundamental property of the everyday use of language (Lee, 2001: 6). In this view, metaphor is not limited to specific discourses like poetic, religious, or scientific language; rather, much of our understanding of everyday experience is structured in terms of metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980;Taylor, 1995: 133), and in Johnson's words "vast domains of our experience, understanding, reasoning, and practice are metaphorically structured" (1987: 137). In the cognitive view, metaphor is not understood as a speaker's violation of rules of competence. Rather, the cognitive paradigm sees metaphor as a means by which more abstract and intangible areas of experience can be conceptualised in terms of familiar and concrete concepts. That is, metaphor is characterised by the conceptualisation of one cognitive domain in terms of components more usually associated with another domain (Taylor, 1995: 132-3). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) emphasise that metaphors involve not only ways of talking about phenomena but also ways of thinking about them. In other words, from a cognitive perspective, different ways of thinking about a particular concept are associated with different metaphors. Thus, as Lee (2001) puts it, "metaphor is in fact a prime manifestation of the cognitive claim that language and thought are inextricably intertwined" (2001: 7).
The present study offers a comparative analysis of the different metaphors of time used in Persian and English, in order to shed light on similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of their conceptualisation of time and the way metaphors are structured in this regard. In doing so, metaphoric expressions are categorised into different groups of conceptual metaphors based on the kind of mapping they involve across different conceptual domains. The examples of metaphors used in this study mostly include everyday expressions used in ordinary language. This view is in line with the cognitive claim that metaphors are not limited to specific literary discourse and abound in our everyday ordinary use of language.

Review of Literature
There have been a number of comparative studies on the conceptual metaphors in Persian, though none of them has been particularly about the metaphors of time. In this section, we look at some of the previous studies relevant to the present paper.
Pirzad Mashak et al. (2012) in a comparative study of basic emotion conceptual metaphors in the English and Persian literary texts, investigated the universality of the conceptualisation of emotion metaphors and the dominant pattern in English and Persian based on Kovecses's (2003) model for linguistic expression of metaphor. The emotions they studied were happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and love. They came to the conclusion that, in spite of the cultural differences in conceptualising these five basic emotions in English and Persian due to the emphasis laid on some aspects of metaphor and entailments, the two languages share most of the general conceptual metaphors in describing these five emotions. That is, most Persian metaphorical expressions of emotions can be literally rendered into English and vice versa, and serve the same metaphorical meaning and effects. They also found that anger was the most universal emotion, whereas sadness was the least universal emotion in this study. Moradi and Pirzad Mashak (2013) in a comparative and contrastive study of the conceptualisation of sadness in Persian and English concluded that although both languages share most sadness conceptual metaphors, some differences are observed at generic-level relating to the existence/nonexistence of metaphors in Persian and English. Afrashi et al. (2013) in a comparative study of orientational conceptual metaphors in Persian and Spanish, examined the orientational metaphors applied to data collected from Spanish, and tried to prove the use of these metaphors at the level of metaphorical mapping as well as linguistic representation in Persian. Analysing 38 samples of orientational conceptual metaphors extracted from different written and oral sources, they concluded that the similarities related to conceptual metaphors based on the human understanding of the sense of 'space' and 'direction' are more than the disparities in these two languages. Zoorvarz et al. (2014) investigated the conceptual metaphors of happiness in a corpus-driven study. They sampled a corpus of contemporary written texts, to represent modern colloquial Persian, and tried to extract the relevant conceptual metaphors of happiness. Analysing the corpus, they extracted 297 conceptual metaphors of happiness within 33 mappings, and then determined the most frequent conceptual mappings and source domains. They tried to suggest the common source domains and name of the mappings for happiness metaphors. In this regard, source domains such as 'object', 'substance' and 'action' were found to be the most frequent. The authors also provided a comparison between the conceptual metaphors of happiness in Persian and English.
As mentioned however, none of the comparative studies focusing on metaphors in Persian has been about the metaphors of time in particular. Among the non-Persian comparative studies on time metaphors, Boroditsky (2001) compared the metaphors of time in English and Mandarin, showing that the two languages talk about time differently. English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is said to be reflected in the way their speakers think about time. Based on these observations, Boroditsky concludes that language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains, and that one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought -e.g, how one tends to think about time -but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense (ibid.).
In yet another comparative study focused on metaphors of time, Eweida (2006) compared English usages of 'time' metaphors with Quranic Arabic realisations and their representations in three English Quranic translations to distinguish the version that corresponded most accurately with the conceptual metaphors found in both languages. The historical, social and religious aspects were also taken into consideration in order to determine the cause of certain conceptual metaphor realisations in both or one of the languages.
Following this short review of relevant literature and having noted that none of the previous comparative studies have been focused on the conceptual metaphors of time in Persian, the present study aims to discover the similarities and differences between Persian and English in their conceptualisation of time.

Theoretical Framework
This study adopts a cognitive approach to metaphor, and makes use of Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory to look at the different expressions of time in Persian and English.
Generally, metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another. So, there are two conceptual domains involved in any given metaphor. The starting point or the described concept is often called the 'target' domain, while the comparison concept or the analogy is called the 'source' domain. In Richards's (1936) terminology the former is called the 'tenor' and the latter is called the 'vehicle' (Saeed, 2009: 359). Hence, for any given metaphor, we can identify a source domain and a target domain. Source domains tend to be relatively concrete areas of experience and target domains tend to be more abstract (Lee, 2001: 6).
Lakoff and Johnson, emphasising the role of metaphor in everyday use of language, have identified a large number of common metaphors termed 'conceptual metaphors' which underlie many everyday metaphoric expressions which are the actual representations of those conceptual metaphors. For example, a spatial metaphor such as HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN, would give us many everyday expressions associated with it, as the following examples show: (1) a. I'm feeling up.
b. You're in high spirits. c. I'm feeling down. d. He's really low these days. (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 15) In this conceptual metaphor (and the example expressions above), spatial relationships of 'up' and 'down' are the source domain; that is, they are used to describe the more abstract concept of 'feeling' which is the target domain in our example.
In what follows, metaphoric expressions of time are looked at under the relevant conceptual metaphors to which they belong. As will be seen, in some cases there is no clear-cut border between the conceptual metaphors and, as a result of this overlap between some of the categories, a certain expression can be thought of as belonging to Journal of Applied Studies in Language, Volume 3 Issue 1 (Jun 2019), p. 43-55 p-issn 2598-4101 e-issn 2615-4706 © Politeknik Negeri Bali http://ojs.pnb.ac.id/index.php/JASL 47 more than one conceptual metaphor.

Metaphors of Time
The examples of time metaphors presented here are organised under eight subheadings based on the different conceptual metaphors they represent. The conceptual metaphors of time covered in this study include TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS A RESOURCE, TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY, TIME IS A LANDSCAPE WE MOVE THROUGH, TIME IS A CONTAINER, TIME IS A CHANGER, TIME IS A PURSUER, and TIME IS A LIVING ENTITY. Each subsection includes common Persian examples together with -exact or near -equivalents in English, in order to shed light on the areas of similarities or differences between the two languages in their use of time metaphors.
As already mentioned, the examples used in this study mostly include everyday expressions. The Persian examples are in most cases in the informal spoken style; nevertheless, the style would not make a difference in the illustration of conceptual mappings intended in this study.

TIME IS MONEY
The first conceptual metaphor examined in this section is the TIME IS MONEY metaphor. Here, the source domain 'money' is used to conceptualise the target domain 'time'. Below is a set of examples representing this metaphor together with equivalents in English. In these examples -and all the examples throughout this paper -, the key words involved in the mapping between the two conceptual domains are underlined. In this case, one key word is a word of time and the other one is mostly a verb originally used in the source domain, which is responsible for the mapping.
(2) a.  Lakoff, 1994) In the idiom (4a), the Persian equivalent does not make use of the expression 'to borrow time', and this phrase -vaqt qarz gereftan (lit. time borrow) 'to borrow time' -is not generally used in this way in standard Persian. Also, regarding the second example (4b), the expression vaqt xaridan (lit. time buy) 'to buy time' is not very commonly seen in standard Persian.

TIME IS A RESOURCE
The second conceptual metaphor presented here, which is closely related to the first one discussed in the previous section, sees time as a 'resource'. The expressions representing this metaphor are very similar to the ones in the TIME IS MONEY metaphor, because of the obvious similarities between the two concepts of 'money' and 'resource'. As can be observed in the above sentences, some of the most common phrases used in Persian to talk about time as a 'resource' are the following ones: As evident from the expressions listed in (5) and (6), there again appears to be a roughly one-to-one relationship between the two languages in talking about time as a 'resource'.

TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY
The next metaphor to be discussed here regards time as a 'moving entity'. The expressions given in (7) represent this conceptual metaphor: As can be seen in the examples, the verbs of movement and other words describing distance are very commonly used in both English and Persian to talk about time in a quite similar fashion. Some of the most frequent verbs in this case are āmadan 'to come', gozaštan 'to pass', and nazdik šodan 'to approach'.
In English, there are also proverbs of time which include this conceptual mapping of movement with verbs such as 'come', as in the following examples: (8) a. Tomorrow may never come.
('No one has seen tomorrow.') b. After night comes the dawn.
('The end of a dark night is bright.') Even though the equivalents of these proverbs in Persian do not necessarily make use of the same verbs of movement -'come' in this case -, but still, as already mentioned, verbs like āmadan 'to come' and gozaštan 'to pass' are very widely used in time expressions in Persian, quite the same way their equivalents are used in English.

TIME IS A LANDSCAPE WE MOVE THROUGH
This is a closely related metaphor to TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY; however in this case, time is not moving, rather it is a landscape through which other entities move. Accordingly, as can be expected, many of the same expressions grouped under the conceptual metaphor TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY can be turned into this metaphor as well, only in this case time is considered fixed and other things move relative to it. Needless to say that some of the expressions used throughout this study can fall into more than one conceptual metaphor. For example, the expression 'time flies' can be categorised into both TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY and TIME IS A LIVING ENTITY metaphors; or, the expression 'within the week' can fall into the conceptual metaphors of TIME IS A CONTAINER and TIME IS A LANDSCAPE WE MOVE THROUGH at the same time.

Conclusion
Comparing the sets of metaphors of time in Persian and English under different classes of conceptual metaphors indicates that the two languages show many similarities in their conceptualisation of time in time-related expressions, and seem to use metaphoric structures in roughly the same way to talk about time. Evidence for this conclusion comes from the use of the same literal collocations in the two languages (as observed in the examples throughout this study), when talking about time. Some of the most widely used instances of verbs collocating with time words are verbs of movement such as āmadan 'to come', nazdik šodan 'to approach', gozaštan 'to pass', or verbs originally used to talk about money or other resources, like hadar dādan 'to waste', dāštan 'to have', hazine kardan 'to invest', sarfe-juyi kardan 'to save', dādan 'to give', etc. However, there are also cases where there is no one-toone relationship between the words used in metaphoric expressions of time in the two languages, as was the case with verb phrases like qarz gereftan-e vaqt 'to borrow time' or xaridan-e vaqt 'to buy time', which are not commonly used in standard Persian.
The results appear to be in line with the cognitive claim that language and thought are closely connected to each other, and the areas of cross-language differences found in use of metaphors and in conceptualising different domains can be traced back to the different ways people with a specific language and culture think about everyday experiences and concepts. As Taylor (1995) argues, "while certain experiences are presumably common to all normal, healthy human beings, others are strongly conditioned by culture and environment, and so it comes as no surprise that we find both considerable cross-language similarity in metaphorical expression, as well as cross-language diversity" (1995: 141). Nevertheless, regarding the use of time metaphors, the similarities observed between Persian and English happen to be far more significant than the minor sporadic differences.