Concept, Metaphor and Idiom

Abstract

The paper describes how metaphorization is manifest throughout the idiomatic spectrum and provides insight into the cultural aspects of language use. It also focuses on the extension of cognitive mental operations, such as metaphorical mapping, facilitating the emergence of figurative scenarios out of the tangible, physical world. The paper argues that the overall English idiomatic language can be classified by conceptuality and most of it by conceptual metaphors (or metonymies, not discussed in this paper). To grasp the essence of global changes in language, one needs to advance from linguistic tools to the socio-cultural environment. Conceptualization is said to have played a crucial role in the development of human thinking. The paper suggests that conceptual metaphors are an integral part of idiomaticity, and both differences and similarities can be detected between different cultural environments. To offer a fairly comprehensive picture of idiom-based research into how the English language is structured, this paper draws on a corpus of around 220,000 words of journalistic and internet-based material.