Metaphorical Conceptualisation of Women in Arabic and English

Abstract

This study aimed at presenting a comparative analysis of some metaphorical expressions used for conceptualizing women in English and Arabic. It adopted a qualitative research model. A set of English and Arabic expressions conventionally used when describing women were collected and grouped according to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) into three general source domains: ANIMALS, PLANTS, and OBJECTS. Then a cross-cultural comparison was made by adopting Barcelona's (2001) framework. Data analysis revealed that the two languages share several basic (universal) metaphors in conceptualizing women. However, some differences between Arabic and English have been detected when conceptualizing women metaphorically. The differences might be due to the different sociocultural interpretations of the source and target domains in each language. In sum, this area of study must be a subject of further research by Arab scholars since Arabic involves a great number of metaphorical exploitations, which needs to be investigated from different perspectives.