Conceptualization of Women through Metaphor by Bilingual Lukabras-English Speakers

Abstract

This study employs the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to investigate bilingual conceptual representation. The study analyses the metaphorical expressions commonly used among Lukabras-English bilinguals in Western Kenya in conceptualizing feminine terms when they speak English. This was motivated by the fact that cognitive linguistics research on human mental representation tends to focus on evidence from monolingual populations. Therefore, the study analyses bilingual figurative language in order to correlate bilingual conceptual representation with the native cognition. A combined method of data elicitation from Lukabras-English bilinguals and the native speaker’s intuition was used to collect conventional metaphorical expressions of women metaphors from the respondents. Conceptual metaphors that are believed to underlie the metaphorical expressions of women were then inferred for analysis. The bilingual metaphors were correlated with conventional metaphors of feminism among native speakers of Lukabras. Findings from this study support the assertion that the bilingual’s conceptual structure is not just a simple addition of the cognitive processes associated with each of their languages but rather a product of a complex process of conceptual restructuring in the languages involved.