The role of path metaphors in conceptualising life in english and serbian: A corpus-based analysis

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to obtain insight into crosslinguistic similarities and differences in English and Serbian regarding the conceptualisation of life via components related to motion along a path. This is accomplished by studying the extended meanings of a set of English and Serbian lexemes associated with departure, passage through intermediate path points, arrival and the space along which the motion occurs, using randomly selected examples from the representative corpora of the two languages. Since a common focus in cognitive linguistic studies has been on the metaphor life is a journey, we show that there is an equally important case of life being conceptualised as a trajector in both languages, which testifies to the phenomenon of metaphor duality. In addition, the direction of the movement also serves as an important factor in structuring various aspects of life and its related concepts.