A Comparative Study of Persian/English Metaphors in Shahrzad & Friends Series: Conceptual Metaphor Theory Applied

This study compared the use of different conceptual metaphors in 2 series in english and persian: friends and shahrzad. friends had 10 seasons and was directed, written, and produced by native english speakers. producers were david crane and marta kauffman in 1994-2004; jennifer aniston and courtney cox were the main actors. general theme of the story was comedy. shahrzad was directed by hasan fathi in 2016-2017. shahab hoseini and taraneh alidousti were the leading actors. shahrzad was directed and written by persian native speakers. to discover the hidden various kinds of metaphors, roughly 10% of 10-20 min of 5 episodes in each season were completely scrutinized. we resorted to the framework by lakoff and johnson (1980) and some metaphors emerged from their examples. moreover, we created some new conceptual metaphors. next, the existing metaphors were categorized under proper categories. frequency of different kinds of metaphors (conceptual, orientational, conduit, and personification) were counted and tabulated. chi-square was used to see whether there were significant differences among these 4 metaphors in each series. chi-square results manifested significant differences among the 4 metaphors in friends and shahrzad. there were significant differences among the 4 metaphors in each series. overall, 158 conceptual metaphors were found in shahrzad and 155 in friends. in sum, 51 universal conceptual metaphors emerged out of these metaphors. conceptual metaphors were the most frequent type and orientational metaphors were the least frequent type of metaphor. we concentrated on visual metaphors which were the visual representations of different types of metaphors.