The Animalification of the World in Nahj al-Balaghah: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics describes language as the perception of human cognitive abilities and views it as a tool for organizing, processing, and conveying information and also the intellectual representation of the universe. Since the basis of cognitive linguistics is semantics, metaphor is viewed as one of the most focal points of study in this approach, and attention to it can be considered as the most prominent development in cognitive linguistics, because cognitive metaphor is not just a figure of speech to decorate discourse, but it is the understanding and experience of an abstract conceptual field in the form of another conceptual domain that is usually more tangible.

Using a cognitive linguistic approach based on nine conceptual metaphor hypotheses, the present research studies the conceptual analysis of all the metaphors of the world in the field of animal in Nahj al-Balaghah.

The most significant findings of this study are:

1. Contrary to the belief of Kövecses excluding the personification only to giving human features to abstract concepts, there are metaphors where animal characteristics are given to non-human phenomena. Therefore, animism includes both personification and animalification.
2. Some of the animalistic features are linked with the abstract concept of the world, and this connection is linguistically unconventional. What improves such an unconventional company is the extension of meaning. This helps the mind to attribute some of the animal's characteristics to an abstract field that lacks those features based on several cognitive mappings.