| dc.description.abstract | This study analyses Kikuyu metaphorical proverbs on women within the cognitive semantics framework to find out the way the principles of cognitive semantics theory may help us gain adequate insight into the portrayal of the woman through proverbs in the Kikuyu society. For the purposes of this study, the metaphor is regarded, as it is in cognitive semantics, as a conceptual strategy for structuring linguistic expressions to construe meaning. This implies that there exists a systematic body of data which a study may identify and examine through construal processes applied by the theory to throw some light on the meanings of the metaphorical proverbs. As proposed in Lakoff‟s and Johnson‟s theory of the conventional metaphor, the metaphor is not a property of individual linguistic expressions and their meanings, but of whole conceptual domains. That is, in principle, any concept from the source domain can be used to reveal some aspect of the nature of a concept in the target domain. Cognitive semantics theory as explained by Croft and Cruse was used in analysing the Kikuyu metaphorical proverbs on women. The most outstanding finding of the study was that proverbs form themes, and therefore a thematic presentation of the metaphorical proverbs creates categories such as: proverbs on the physical features of a woman, proverbs on women‟s behaviour, proverbs on the role of women in the society, and proverbs on general societal attitudes about the woman. Analysing Kikuyu proverbs using the principles of cognitive semantics revealed that appreciating their full implications takes both cultural and cognitive parameters into account, in a process that is understood as a construal operation. Further analysis revealed that the metaphor is in some cases used overtly, and in others it is at the implicit level, hidden in the complexities of a proverb. Metaphorical mapping is therefore a useful tool for revealing the source-target pairing in a metaphorical proverb, which once understood, triggers ontological correspondences which entail inference patterns of whole conceptual domains in the construal of meaning. | en_US |
