Animal metaphors in Bedouin Jordanian Arabic : a syntactic and Morpho-semantic study

Abstract EN

This study investigated the syntactic and morpho-semantic agreement in animal metaphors in Bedouin Jordanian Arabic (BJA).

It discussed the case of the strong grammatical correlation between animal metaphors and the verbal structure where the use of animal metaphors results in an agreement pattern that matches the features of the used human name.

Furthermore, the study explored the subject conceptually, with respect to the implication of the metaphoric reading of animal names for morphosemantic and syntactic agreement.

The study adopted Chomsky’s (1995, 2001) feature system and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1993) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) as its main theoretical frameworks.

The analysis involved the process of conceptual mapping between two domains where the conceptual system determines the values of interpretable φ-features reported in the animal metaphor in BJA.

The metaphorical extension from one domain into another is also investigated syntactically.

In addition, the study raised awareness towards the importance of the conceptual basis of Arabic animal metaphors and the accountability of the conceptually based system of φ-features to account for morpho-semantic and syntactic agreement.

The study argued that an animal metaphor is a hybrid lexical item with the animal name and a set of features suitable for a human name, which give rise to a new phenomenon in subject-verb agreement.

Furthermore, the study proposed that the meaning of the animal metaphor names differs semantically based on the metaphoric reading.

Therefore, people are correlated with animals for the sake of conveying negative or positive evaluations.