In this article we are concerned with the issue of metaphor universals in poetry. By metaphor universals we mean any (universal or potentially universal) metaphor-related phenomena. Metaphor universals are approached from a conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) perspective here. The majority of our examples are taken from American English, British English and Hungarian poems, including a number of Hungarian folksongs. Since universality assumes non-universality, we are concerned with both universal and non-universal aspects of metaphor in poetry. We attempt to answer two questions: What makes some metaphors universal? And What makes some other conceptual metaphors non-universal in poetry? In answering these questions, we use an extended view of CMT provided by Kövecses (2017, 2015), which has two main components: the multi-level view of metaphor and the contextualist version of CMT. The analysis demonstrates that this complex approach offers several new insights into the study of poetic metaphor.
CITATION STYLE
Szelid, V., & Kövecses, Z. (2018). Metaphor universals in literature. Magyar Nyelvor, 142(3), 452–478. https://doi.org/10.18226/19844921.v10.n20.10
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