EFL Students’ Use of the Verb ‘See’: A Conceptual Metaphor Analysis

Abstract

This study investigated Indonesian EFL university students’ use of conceptual metaphor with the English perception verb ‘see’. The idea of a conceptual metaphor refers to how people understand someone's idea represented by linguistics elements. The use of perception verbs in everyday life combined with other words that do not correlate with the five senses can inform readers of the state of language use in certain contexts. The methods employed in this research were descriptive and qualitative. The data were collected from the essays of Indonesian EFL university students (n = 27 students and 390 essays) and were processed and analyzed using AntFileConverter and AntConc concordance software. The researchers classified the perception verb ‘see’ based on its form, structure and meaning, and analyzed the conceptual metaphors. Five concepts of metaphors were found for the English perception verb ‘see’, including impression, fantasy, understanding, assumption, and prediction.  Keywords: conceptual metaphors, source domain, target domain, English perception verb, verb ‘see’