love and beloved metaphors in Jordanian Arabic and English songs

Abstract

This study examines love and beloved metaphors from the cross-cultural perspective of Jordanian Arabic (JA) and English. The conceptual models suggested by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and Kövecses (2014) and force dynamics proposed by Talmy (1988) are adopted as the theoretical frameworks for this study. The data was collected from contemporary songs by Jordanian and English-speaking artists. Unlike previous comparative studies on love and beloved metaphors, this study demonstrates that source domains found in JA songs such as pain/suffering, sadness, weakness, wound, stupid endeavour, cruelty and deadly force also exist in English songs to conceptualise love. It is argued that while the use of these source domains in JA is expected as they form part of the prototypical cognitive model of love or the love matrix in JA, they could be viewed as nonprototypical in English. The analysis also revealed certain JA culture-specific source domains used to conceptualise the object of love [beloved], i.e. arabian oryx and basil. We argued that despite the existence of similar conceptual metaphors in the two languages, geographical, historical and ideological factors may have an effect on the prevailing conceptual frames in a certain speech community creating some differences in the metaphorical conceptualisations of love and beloved.