Abstract
Numerous scholars have demonstrated the existence of pervasive directionality in verbal metaphors, for example when comparing the two terms ‘conscience’ and ‘compass’, the preferred direction would be ‘Conscience is a compass’, while saying ‘A compass in conscience’ would be anomalous Most of the theories in this field claim that the directionality of metaphors stems from the conceptual level (Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, 1980; in philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. HarperCollins, 1999), while recently, a few researchers have pointed to the critical influence of different grammatical structures on directionality (Shen & Porat, in Handbook of categorization in cognitive science, chapter 47. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101107-2.00047-6, 2017; Gil and Shen, Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences, 10, 2275). Such findings showing the significant impact of linguistic factors on metaphor directionality lead to the hypothesis that different linguistic modalities can affect metaphor directionality. In this study, we examined for the first time the effect of the linguistic medium on directionality, mainly focusing on modality (written vs. oral). The language chosen for the study was Arabic, which, because of its diglossic state, has one of the biggest differences between the two modalities in the daily life of its speakers. Two Arabic-speaking groups were asked to produce asymmetric similes using 32 metaphoric pairs: one group performed the task in written form using Modern Standard Arabic, and the other in oral form using Colloquial Palestinian Arabic, and then computing the percentage of the similes emitted in the preferred direction (directionality). The results showed a significant difference in directionality percentages between the two mediums favoring the written MSA, in accordance with our hypothesis. The findings are discussed with regard to metaphor directionality theory, as well as the effect of the linguistic medium.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my doctoral advisors Professor David Gil of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at Max Planck Institute for The Science and Human History, and Professor Yeshayahu Shen in the Program of the Cognitive Studies of Language Use and the Department of Literature at Tel-Aviv University. To me, they are much more than advisors; they are true teachers who opened my eyes and enlightened me throughout my doctoral studies. Furthermore, they patiently and consistently guided me through all the hard problems I faced from beginning to end, in this specific study and many others.
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Full list of the experiment items with the averages of canonical responses for each item.
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Kiadan, J. The effect of linguistic medium on metaphor directionality: written standard Arabic versus oral colloquial Arabic. J Cult Cogn Sci 8, 65–78 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-023-00135-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-023-00135-1