Investigation of Season Metaphors from the Perspective of Cognition: Season as Space

The study aims to identify metaphors of SEASON in English and Vietnamese song lyrics in the light of cognitive linguistics. To be specific, the study follows the theory of conceptual metaphors which was initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Within the scope of the paper, the entity SEASON is treated as a target domain which is conceptualized through the source domain SPACE, which is examined via the corpora built from English and Vietnamese song lyrics composed the duration of the 20th century onward. By employing descriptive and comparative methods, and adopting the procedure of conceptual metaphor identification (Steen, 2011), the results show that English and Vietnamese share 2 conceptual metaphors of SEASON, namely, location and path. Accordingly, this study functions as an attempt to contribute to the area of metaphor research in cognitive perspective in Vietnam.