The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the metaphor system for conceptualizing the Self in Arabic. A comparison of structural means for conceptualizing inner life in Arabic and English leads to the conclusion that although on the structural (‘grammatical’) level the differences between the two languages are indeed considerable, they become far less radical on the conceptual (‘semantic’) level. More specifically, it is argued here that in Arabic, as in English, inner experiences are for the most part conceptualized metaphorically and that Arabs seem to conceptualize their inner lives in a way similar, or at least comparable, to the speakers of English. While the article shows that on the conceptual level there are several important correspondences between Arabic and English, it hypothesizes that they reflect some fundamental and presumably universal human experiences and cognitive abilities. Finally, the linguistic material analyzed here provides a point of departure for touching upon the relativism-universalism debate. The paper argues that the controversy depends, at least to some extent, on whether one chooses to focus on potentially universal conceptualizations (and their underlying cognitive mechanisms) or more culture-specific structural relations (the contingent and historical conventions). Thus, while it seems to be a matter of one's personal decision whether to place the potentially universal in the foreground and the more idiosyncratic in the background, or the other way round, the article emphasizes the usefulness of explaining certain striking conceptual similarities in terms of their bodily basis.
The present article is a corpus-based study that aims to shed some light on the use of conflict metaphors in Arab economic news reporting. When examining the conventionality and functions of various metaphors for conflict, the paper offers the following empirical findings. First, conflict metaphors are highly entrenched in Arab economic journalism. Second and relatedly, the different linguistic conceptualizations of these metaphors can be used interchangeably. Finally, the analyses described herein show that Arabic and English have a great deal in common as far as the cognitive and pragmatic aspects of conflict metaphors are concerned. Thus, these metaphors (1) provide the users of both languages with a very useful frame for understanding and evaluating various social phenomena, (2) are frequently used for highly comparable reasons of persuasion, and — finally — (3) create very similar networks of entailments which, in both languages, structure the readers’ interpretation accordingly. Having discussed the commonalities between Arabic and English, the paper goes on to hypothesize that they might reflect certain fundamental and presumably universal human experiences.
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